Respect (BRON Studios, Creative Media Finance, MGM, United Artists, Universal, 2021)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d been wanting to see since it first came out earlier this year: Respect, a biopic of Aretha Franklin directed by Liesl Tommy (a woman who’s mostly worked on TV – notably on The Walking Dead, AMC’s modern-dress zombie series – and has no other feature-film credits) from a script by Callie Khouri and Tracey Scott Wilson. There’s another Aretha Franklin biopic floating around out there, made for a streaming service and starring Cynthia Erivo as Aretha, but this one more or less had the imprimatur of official status. Supposedly, a month before her death Aretha Franklin met with Jennifer Hudson and told her that if anyone ever made a movie of her life, she’d like Hudson to play her – and it’s a measure of how limited the opportunities for Black women in films still are that it’s taken 15 years since Hudson’s star-making turn in the film Dreamgirls for her to get another role fully worthy of her talents. Respect is the sort of movie that’s good as it stands but could have been a great deal better; in a laudable attempt to avoid the Jazz Singer clichés that were virtually inevitable in a film with this basic story – a clergyman’s offspring forsakes the music of his/her dad’s church and makes it as a star in popular music – writers Khouri and Wilson and director Tommy fell into another set and turned the film essentially into a Black version of the 1955 tear-jerker biopic of white singer Lillian Roth, I’ll Cry Tomorrow.

It also didn’t help that Tommy and her cinematographer, Kramer Morgenthau, shot the whole film in the murky past-is-brown look that’s become Hollywood’s default look for just about everything. As I’ve written before in connection with even better reality-based Black films like Ava DuVernay’s Selma, the past-is-brown look is hard enough to take in a film in which the principals are white and it’s even more annoying when the principals are Black: their brown faces blend all too readily into the murky brown backgrounds and it’s often hard to pick them out. Also the script bears little more than a casual relationship to the facts of Aretha’s life: it’s true that I’ve never read a biography of her and so I don’t know whether her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin (pastor of the largest and most influential church in Detroit and the best-selling artist on Chicago’s Chess Records even though he didn’t sing or play an instrument: his records were merely recordings of his sermons), was living with another woman he wasn’t married to after Aretha’s mother left the family, or whether Aretha had a bout with alcoholism at the height of her career in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s that nearly incapacitated her, and she intended her return-to-gospel album Amazing Grace (1972) as a prayer of thanks to God for getting her off the booze the way John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in 1964 as a thank-you letter to God for giving him the strength to get off alcohol and heroin.

But the parts of this story I do know about are told in this movie so far from how they actually happened I have little trust that Khouri and Wilson are giving us the real story of the parts I don’t. In this movie Aretha is sexually molested at age 10 in the middle of a party at her father’s house at which several illustrious soul singers, including Dinah Washington and Sam Cooke, are present; a man at the party sneaks into Aretha’s bedroom, asks if she has a boyfriend, and when she says no he asks her, “Would you like me to be your boyfriend?,” and without her having a chance either to say no or get the hell out of there, he closes the bedroom door behind them and … According to Khouri and Wilson, this is Aretha’s “Rosebud” moment: she never tells anyone (her mom – or at least the mother figure who’s living with her dad and functioning as such – notices something is wrong with her and tries to pry the secret out of her, but without success) but she periodically withdraws into near-catatonic fugue states during which she won’t even speak, much less sing, and these continue to afflict her even as she eventually becomes a superstar and brings soul music to the white masses worldwide.

I find it virtually impossible to believe such an influential and highly regarded Black minister as Rev. C. L. Franklin could have sustained a relationship with a woman he wasn’t married to, and given what I’ve read about the antagonism between the gospel and R&B audiences (though to us white people gospel and soul may sound awfully similar, they appealed to two dramatically different audiences and lovers of gospel music generally rejected R&B and soul and refused to listen to them; I’ve often told the story that a month before he died, Sam Cooke tried to sit in with his old gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, and was literally booed off the stage with catcalls like, “Get that blues singer off the stage! This is a Christian program!”) it’s hard to believe that Rev. Franklin would have even allowed R&B and soul records to be played in his home, much less invited singers in those styles to his home. (At the same time, if Khouri and Wilson had accurately depicted this dividing line between gospel and soul in the script, this film would have seemed like even more of a ripoff of The Jazz Singer than it does.) The film doesn’t mention that Aretha Franklin cut her first album, a gospel record, for Chess in 1956 at age 14 – Rev. C. L. Franklin was Chess’s biggest-selling artist (moving more records than Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf!) and when he told the Chess brothers he wanted his 14-year-old daughter Aretha to record a gospel album, they let him – but they did the album on the cheap. Instead of getting her into a studio and recording her properly, they just clipped her songs from the recordings they’d made of Rev. Franklin’s services to create the best-selling albums of Rev. Franklin’s sermons. Still, this is the first Aretha Franklin album – made four years before she launched her career as a secular soul singer at Columbia Records, where she was signed by the legendary producer John Hammond.

It’s not clear from the movie exactly how Hammond discovered her – it was on a demo he’d received from songwriter Curtis Lewis, who had recruited Aretha to sing a song he’d written called “Today I Sing the Blues” – or what sort of music Hammond wanted from her. The script for Respect makes it seem like Hammond produced all her Columbia records, but he didn’t: at a loss for what to do with her, Columbia recruited Clyde Otis (one of the first Black producers to work for a major white label) from Mercury, where he’d masterminded Dinah Washington’s rise from Black star to crossover superstar with her 1959 record “What a Difference a Day Made.” During her five years at Columbia Aretha worked with various producers, sometimes singing soul versions of 1920’s songs like Dinah had (the one Columbia record with Aretha that even nosed into the pop charts was her unlikely cover of “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” a record that’s been ridiculed by generations of writers who’ve never heard it – it’s actually pretty good), sometimes attempting jazz (Hammond had reportedly heard her as the next Billie Holiday – who had died just one year before Aretha signed with Columbia) and sometimes edging towards the kind of searing soul that would eventually launch her career into superstar orbit when she switched labels from Columbia to Atlantic in 1967.

In his autobiography Hammond was resentful about the way his bosses at Columbia took control of Aretha’s career and recruited other producers to make her records there – and every nasty thing he’d said about how he could have made Aretha a star in 1961 if he’d stayed in control of her records was confirmed when in the early 1980’s Columbia released a compilation of Aretha’s records there called Aretha Sings the Blues, in which they presented 13 songs that showed Aretha groping towards her later style and then one, “Maybe I’m a Fool,” in which she achieves it. The only song on the compilation actually produced by John Hammond, “Maybe I’m a Fool” is as good as anything Aretha cut for Atlantic – a searing gospel-rooted vocal, hammering piano triplets (by Ray Bryant, whom Hammond recruited as her accompanist because he, too, had had roots in the Black church), and even a lyric surprisingly similar to her first Atlantic hit, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” another one of those blues laments in which the singer tells us that her man is a creep but she loves him anyway. (Don’t believe me when I say “Maybe I’m a Fool” was Aretha’s first masterpiece? Hear it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMjWrFgQ1Vs.)

The film also rather oddly portrays the relationship between Aretha and her great predecessor, Dinah Washington. Dinah is played by Mary J. Blige (who wouldn’t be bad casting for a Dinah Washington biopic) and appears in two scenes, in one of which she gets upset that the 10-year-old Aretha sings a jazz novelty at one of Rev. Franklin’s parties and Dinah announces she was planning to record the song herself; and a later scene at the Village Vanguard nightclub in New York in which Aretha acknowledges that Dinah is in the audience and goes into a version of one of Dinah’s greatest songs, “This Bitter Earth” – and Dinah angrily turns over the table she’s sitting at and chews Aretha out for doing one of her songs in her presence. The film doesn’t mention that Dinah Washington died of a prescription drug overdose in December 1963 – which, ironically, benefited Aretha’s career by eliminating her principal competition. As long as Dinah was alive Aretha would have been only “another Black girl who sings like Dinah Washington.” Once Dinah died, Aretha was her natural successor – even though it took three more years and a change of record labels to bring Aretha the stardom she deserved. In February, 1964 – just two months after Dinah’s death – Columbia recorded Aretha in an album of Dinah’s songs called Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, and though Dinah had been billed as “Queen of the Blues” and Aretha as “Queen of Soul,” there’s definitely an air about this album of “The Queen is dead, long live the Queen.”

The film depicts both Hammond (Tate Donovan) and Aretha’s producer at Atlantic, Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron), as the usual music-industry assholes – though there’s a nice scene in which Rev. Franklin shows up at one of Hammond’s sessions with Aretha and apologizes for her bad behavior. Hammond says he worked with Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and they gave him a lot more trouble than Aretha did, and Rev. Franklin fires back, “Aretha didn’t grow up in a whorehouse like they did.” There are also other annoying deviations from the known facts in this film; in the movie Aretha recruits her sisters Erma (Saycon Sengbloh) and Carolyn (Halley KIlgore) as her backup singers – Aretha’s real backup singers on her early Atlantic records were a vocal trio called the Sweet Inspirations (one of whom, Cissy Houston, was Whitney Houston’s mother) whom she recorded and toured with until Elvis Presley lured them away because he could pay them more. And of course, being the lead character in a biopic about a woman singer, the men in her life are monsters: Ted White (Marlon Wayans) is shown as an egomaniac wife beater, and the man she finally leaves him for, Ken Cunningham (Albert Jones), isn’t much better.

Not surprisingly, Respect comes most searingly to life when Jennifer Hudson as Aretha is shown actually making music; though her voice doesn’t have quite the edge and power of Aretha’s own, Hudson is one of our very best living woman soul singers (when I wrote a long obituary on Aretha’s death I named her, along with Jill Scott and the gospel singer Mandisa, as the three singers who seem to me to be carrying forward Aretha’s legacy) and she’s certainly appropriate casting. But the I’ll Cry Tomorrow turn the plot takes gets to be a bit much – while the fictional Aretha is shown turning up bombed for a concert date in Europe and collapsing on stage, the real Aretha was performing at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and making an incandescent live album that’s one of the highlights of her career. Respect is full of great moments that deserved a better movie – like the scene in which Aretha shows up at the studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to make her first Atlantic single and notices that all the musicians are white. “Don’t they have any Negroes who play music around here?” she says (and for all the criticism I’ve been leveled at Khouri and Wilson for their script, at least they get that right and use the word “Negro,” which was historically accurate, instead of “Black,” which came later), and Jerry Wexler notices the look of distaste she gives them at having been dragged all the way to Alabama to record with a bunch of Southern white boys with Southern white-boy racial attitudes. “Percy Sledge had that same look on his face – until he heard these boys play,” Wexler says. Later Aretha is shown working out her rewrite of Otis Redding’s song “Respect” with her sisters, who take their childhood nickname for her, “Ree,” and use it as the basis of the backing vocals – and the result is such an electrifying transformation of the song few people today identify it with anyone but Aretha. (It was Aretha, not Redding, who wrote the spectacular chorus that became an anthem of feminist empowerment: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me/R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Take care, TCB.”)

The film also does an O.K. job of depicting Aretha’s relationship to the civil rights movement, including her friendship with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown, who does an acceptable turn in the nearly impossible task of playing someone whose actual looks and voice are so much a part of the public record), her increasing militancy (Aretha and her father have the debate between nonviolence and harsher forms of resistance a lot of Black people were having in the late 1960’s, and she publicly supports Angela Davis and records a cover of Nina Simone’s anthem of Black pride, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”) and the shock she and her family felt when King was killed, as if they’d lost one of their own. But once again Khouri and Wilson can’t resist tweaking an already good story: they have Aretha sing King’s favorite song, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” at King’s funeral – which she didn’t. The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (who’d been onstage behind King at the 1963 March on Washington and had seen he was bombing with a dull historical lecture; she got in his ear and told him, “Give ’em the dream, Martin! Give ’em the dream!,” which he famously did) sang “Precious Lord” at King’s funeral – and Aretha sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral four years later. The writers build the recording of the Amazing Grace album into an appropriately uplifting finish (though even there they slip up – when she tells her father that he taught her all the songs she’s going to sing, I couldn’t resist saying, “Except Marvin Gaye’s ‘Wholly Holy,’ which I learned from his album What’s Going On; and Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ which I learned from her album Tapestry”) for a movie that’s magnificent in parts but also frustrating in parts, containing a stirring performance by Jennifer Hudson but marred by a script that ran roughshod over Aretha’s real life.

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga: One Last Time (CBS-TV, aired November 28, 2021)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched a much-hyped CBS-TV concert special featuring Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga performing at Radio City Music Hall for what was billed as “One Last Time.” Bennett is 95 and has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease – though, as with Glen Campbell, it doesn’t seem to have affected his musicianship any. Experts on Alzheimer’s have said that out of all one’s memories, music is the last to go – and Bennett’s singing on this show, though hardly what it was in his glory years, was tuneful and musical. Only one high note in one song escaped his reach; otherwise he was in quite good late form. The concert began with four songs by Lady Gaga solo, which showed that despite the occasional heaviness of her voice she’s got the chops to be a great jazz singer. When I first heard Lady Gaga on her album The Fame Monster (actually an earlier record called The Fame reissued in a package with an EP called Monster) I was impressed more by her songwriting than her singing. There’s not much you can do with so-called “electronic dance music” anyway except spit out the lyrics in time, but what impressed me about Gaga was she wasn’t just sticking a few words on top of a dance groove and calling it a song. Her songs were well constructed and had identifiable beginnings, middles and ends.

Then I heard her and Bennett do “The Lady Is a Tramp” on Bennett’s Duets II album (unlike Frank Sinatra’s two duets albums, Bennett insisted on recording the parts with his partners present in the studio and singing with him in real time instead of overdubbing their parts later) and it impressed me that Lady Gaga had the rhythmic flexibility to sing standards and wasn’t strait-jacketed into the strict tempi of dance music. (It also made me wish the late Donna Summer had cut a standards album: judging by her beautiful phrasing on the slow introductions of songs like “Last Dance” and “On the Radio,” a Summer Sings Standards album would likely have been quite good.) The four Lady Gaga solo songs that opened last night’s show were Frank Loesser’s “Luck, Be a Lady” from Guys and Dolls, Milton Delugg’s and Willie Stein’s “Orange Colored Sky” from 1950, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)” from the late 1920’s and John Kander’s and Fred Ebb’s “Theme from New York, New York.” After Lady Gaga subjected “Luck, Be a Lady” to some awkward lyric changes to make it more suitable for a woman (it was originally written for a man), I was wondering what she was going to do to “Let’s Do it” to duck the P.C. Thought Police’s condemnations she would surely have got if she’d sung the opening lines of the refrain, “Chinks do it, Japs do it, Up in Lapland little Lapps do it.” As it turned out, she deleted that part of the song altogether, going straight from the verse (which she phrased beautifully) to the ninth bar of the refrain.

She said “Orange Colored Sky” was one of two jazz songs she’d sung at a benefit which Bennett was also present for; he sent someone backstage to her and asked to meet her, and when they finally got together Bennett told her, “You’re a jazz singer.” “Orange Colored Sky” was written in 1950 and first recorded a year later as Capitol Records’ choice for a vehicle to pair Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton – and as Cole tried his best to swing with the big brassy blatts of Kenton’s elephantine ensemble behind him, he closed the record with a joke, “I thought love was quieter than this!” (“Of course you did!” I joked back. “Your wife had sung with Duke Ellington!”) I was also amused that Lady Gaga, in the middle of “Theme from New York, New York,” “A lady can sing this song, too” – either she forgot or she never knew that this song was written for a woman, Liza Minnelli, for the film New York, New York that gave it its title. Then Bennett came out for his solo set, three songs: Michel Legrand’s “Watch What Happens,” Irving Berlin’s “Steppin’ Out” (written for Fred Astaire’s 1948 musical Easter Parade and the title track of Bennett’s tribute album to Astaire) and Bart Howard’s “Fly Me to the Moon” (originally called “in Other Words” when it was recorded by Kaye Ballard and Peggy Lee in the early 1960;s, but retitled by Frank Sinatra when he recorded it with Count Basie for the album It Might as Well Be Swing).

The next set featured duets between Bennett and Gaga on the song “The Lady Is a Tramp” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and two songs by Cole Porter, “Love for Sale” and “Anything Goes,” to promote the Bennett-Gaga duet album (their second) which features exclusively Porter songs. Cole Porter wrote “Love for Sale” as the world-weary lament of a prostitute, something that didn’t really come off here even though they included the song’s rarely performed verse. But my favorite version remains Dinah Washington’s from the 1955 album After Hours with Miss D, which doesn’t include the verse and made one change in the lyrics (“Appetizing young love for sale” became “I’m advertising young love for sale”), but her rendition buzzes with anger and venom over being sexually exploited. Bennett and Gaga did the verse relatively slowly but sped up to Dinah’s tempo on the refrain, though without the sense of righteous indignation. For “Anything Goes” Bennett and Gaga were clearly both having fun with Porter’s song about changing mores (the verse reads, “Times have changed/And we’ve often rewound the clock/Since the Puritans got a shock/When they landed on Plymouth Rock/If today, any shocks they would try to stem/Instead of landing on Plymouth Rock/Plymouth Rock would land on them”). After that Lady Gaga sang a verse of “Happy Birthday to You” to Bennett on his 95th birthday and then introduced what she claimed would be the last song Tony Bennett will ever sing in public – and of course it was his greatest and most monumental hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

That song had an emotional significance for me, not only because when it became a hit in 1962 it was a blessed respite from all the garbage rock ’n’ roll that was clogging the charts just then (with most of the great rockers from the 1950’s – Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis – sidelined by death, draft or scandal, the pop charts were filled with the so-called “rock” of people like Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Brian Hyland, whose hit “Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini” would be my choice for the absolute worst song of all time), but because both Tony Bennett and I were born in San Francisco. The song was discovered by Bennett’s long-time accompanist, the late (and beautiful) pianist Ralph Sharon, who thought it might be a nice novelty item for Bennett to add to hsi set list when his upcoming tour played San Francisco. Then Bennett’s label, Columbia, mounted a big promotion for the Broadway musical All American, not only recording the original cast album but having Duke Ellington record an entire album of the All American songs and getting as many of their other artists to record songs from the musical’s score as they could. They assigned Bennett to do the show’s lovely ballad “Once Upon a Time” and needed something to put on the B-side of the record. Bennett and Sharon trotted out their little novelty and recorded it, whereupon some D.J. somewhere flipped the record over, played “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and it turned out to be an enormous hit, the biggest of Bennett’s career and the legacy song for which he will no doubt be best remembered when he finally croaks. Kudos are also in order for the exciting jazz band that backed Bennett and Gaga on this show – especially the ferocious Black drummer, whose first name is Donald (I didn’t catch his last name), who drove the performances aggressively.

China’s Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America (CNN, aired November 28, 2021)

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

After the Tony Bennett-Lady Gaga special I ended up switching channels and watching a quite different sort of show, a Fareed Zakaria special report called China’s Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America. Xi Jinping is the current President of China, and Zakaria’s show argued that his leadership is as revolutionary as those of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Mao, who ruled China as virtually an absolute dictator from the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 to his death in 1976, not only created the current Communist government of China but periodically threw the country into economic and social chaos with big campaigns like the Great Leap Forward of 1958 (an ill-advised attempt to modernize China by literally encouraging people to install steel furnaces and other bits of industrial infrastructure in their backyards) and the Great Proletaroan Cultural Revolution of 1966. This was the one in which Mao purged virtually the entire leadership of China, sending politicians and intellectuals into the Chjinese countryside to work as farm laborers and upending the entire social structure of China. One of the victims of this was Xi Jiaoping, whose father had been in the leadership class Mao was determined to purge, and instead of racing to it by becoming either an active or a secret opponent of the regime, Xi responded to being essentially orphaned in his teen years by becoming “redder than red,” in the Chinese phrase, and embracing the orthodoxy with the fervor of a true believer. (Come to think of it, this was probably toue outcome Nao wanted for the cadres he so suddenly displaced and relegated to manual-labor jobs.)

Xi applied for membership in the Communist Party and at first was rejected several times because of the continuing disgrace of his family, but ultimately he got in and rose methodically through the hierarchy. He also specialized in agronomy as his career and spent several years in the U.S. learning American farming methods. When Xi became vice-president under Deng – whose policies opened the door both to Chinese capitalism and to foreign investors (and leading to the essential de-industrialization of America as U.S. companies en masse moved their production to China, where wages were low and the repressive dictatorship banned trade unions and blocked any attempts by workers to organize or demand higher pay, benefits and safer working conditions), thereby rendering China a “Communist” country in name only – he was hailed as a reformer, met with U.S. Presidents, and projected a boyish, energetic image. When Xi became President of China on Deng’s death and subsequently had himself proclaimed “President for Life” by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (he did that while Donald Trump was President of the U.S., and Trump’s reaction was predictable: “‘President for Life’? That sounds like a good idea to me”), he swung China towards a policy of even more bitter repression, a huge military buildup aimed at reconquering Taiwan and dominating the South China Sea and the Asian-Pacific region in general, and an aggressive industrial and high-tech development project that, among other things, is making China the world’s leader in renewable energy technology.

While China skipped the recent Glasgow summit on climate change and is openly defying any international efforts to limit the use of highly polluting fossil fuels like coal, it’s also vastly expanding its renewable energy technology while the U.S. is basically ignoring it – with the likely result that when the U.S. finally decides to switch to renewable energy (most likely because we’ll simply be running out of any other kind), we’ll probably have to buy the technology from China. Among the concerns of the current Chinese government are any attempt at political opening, which they regard as an invitation to allow the whole regime to collapse the way the Soviet Union did in 1989 – which, Zakarla explains, is the main reason not only for the forcible takeover of Hong Kong and the systematic breaking of all the agreements China made when it received Hong Kong back from British colonial rule in 1997, but also for the fierce, almost Nazi-style repression of the Uiguhrs, the Muslim community in northwestern China’s Sinjiang province. The film graphically portrayed China as a country on the move while the U.S. is mired in political conflict and stasis – Zakaria included footage of the January 6, 2021 riots in the U.S. Capitol (which Chinese propagandists have been showing around the world to get non-aligned countries to come to their side instead of ours: the message China is sending with these images is, “This is what democracy looks like – and this is why you shouldn’t want it!”) and contrasted it with the lock-step military parades in Tienanmen Square last June to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

It also briefly discussed the fate of China’s leading high-tech entrepreneur, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, who mysteriously “disappeared” for three months on the eve of a major initial public offering for one of his companies, and when he reappeared on Chinese TV, instead of the highly flamboyant figure he’d been before (including performing as a rock musician at company parties in makeups and costumes the members of KISS might have found excessive) he looked defeated and wan. One gets the impression that in China there’s room for only one personality cult, and it’s Xi’s. Shows like China’s Iron Fist seem to me eerily to invoke the similar debates during the 1930’s over whether democracy or dictatorship was better for the long-term health of a society: a lot of people in the 1930’s seriously argued that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the Soviet Union could handle the Great Depression and the other issues facing major countries better than presumably slower-moving, less efficient republican systems like Great Britain’s and the U.S.’s. World War II was long assumed to have resolved that conflict on the side of republican democracy (though Britain and the U.S. had had to ally themselves with Stalin’s dictatorship to defeat Hitler’s), but now it’s coming back big-time as today’s ruling classes increasingly regard democracy as an expensive luxury they can do without. When people have a right to vote on their leaders – even within the highly circumscribed limits imposed on them by capitalist ruling classes – they have a tendency to elect people who will at least try to slow down the current ruling elite’s long-term project of increasing wealth and income inequality. Between that and the ways in which public dissent from that is taking shape – not as calls for socialism or a more egalitarian capitalism, but as nationalism, racism and calls for long-term democracies like the U.S. to become more dictatorial and seek a return to previous cultural norms and thereby “make _____ (fill in country’s name) great again,” the prospects for democracy worldwide look even bleaker today than they did in the 1930’s.

Alien (20th Century-Fox, 1979)

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

Yesterday I did little but write an extended journal entry and, after 6:30, do one of my movie marathons, watching three films in sequence on Turner Classic Movies and then running a Blu-Ray disc of a fourth. The first film in my sequence was Ridley Scott’s science-fiction horror thriller Alien (1979), a film I’d previously seen only under poor circumstances on an airliner as an in-flight film (one wonders how anyone who ordered an in-flight dinner during a showing of Alien could possibly keep it down!). TCM host Ben Mankiewicz reminisced about how he first saw Alien at home via a TV screener – this was before videotapes of movies were widely available but he had scored one for promotional purposes – and he had a hard time with the film because it wasn’t interrupted by commercials and therefore there was nothing to break Scott’s artfully built-up tension. Alien was filmed in 1979 in Scott’s native England (later, after its huge box-office success, he’d get the green light to film Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? under the title Blade Runner, but he had to shoot it in the U.S. and have to deal with American crews’ insistence on strict scheduled breaks and other inconveniences he hadn’t had to deal with at home).

It was based on a story by Ronald Shusett that was adapted into a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon, and it concerns a cargo spaceship called the Nostromo (the name is from Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel Nostromo, though the plots of Nostromo and Alien seem to have little to do with each other) which is on its way back to Earth with about 20,000 tons of refined ore space crews on other planets are shipping to Earth for use. We first get some long atmospheric shots of the interior of the Nostromo, beautifully composed and accompanied by Jerry Goldsmith’s stunning music (I know film scores aren’t supposed to call attention to themselves, but this one does and seems quite a bit better than the usual run of Goldsmith film music), before we start meeting the seven-member crew. They are Dallas (Tom Skerritt, top-billed – given that it’s become practically Sigourney Weaver’s life’s work to star in Alien movies, it’s surprising she didn’t get top billing on the first one), the ship’s captain; Ash (Ian Holm), the science officer; Ripley (Sigourney Weaver); Brett (the young Harry Dean Stanton); Kane (John Hurt); Lambert (Veronica Cartwright – I had quite forgotten there was another woman in the cast besides Sigourney Weaver!); and the token Black guy, Parker (Yaphet Kotto).

The opening scenes of the spacecraft reveal a strong influence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (though, oddly, the computer monitors look considerably lower-tech than they did in Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece and the onboard computer, “Mother,” can talk but mostly communicates to the crew via cathode-ray video displays that have already become obsolete) in the way the ship’s exteriors and interiors are constructed, the ways people interact on board (though the synthetic food they have to eat is considerably closer to the real thing than the stuff in 2001, which one critic referred to as “sanitized swill”) and the mixing Scott and his sound designers (imdb.com lists eight people on the sound crew) did, including the astronauts’ breaths heavily amplified to indicate they’re moving around in spacesuits. The action kicks into gear when the Nostromo receives what the crew originally interprets as a distress call from another spaceship right when they’re in the middle of an argument about the size of the bonuses they can expect and how to wheedle more money from the company they work for. Parker, the voice-of-reason Black guy around all the stupid white people, tries to talk the rest of the crew out of answering the call, but he’s overruled because company policy is that if there’s a distress call in space the crew has to answer it or forfeit their bonuses altogether. The ship duly sends out Kane to investigate the wreckage and see if he can find any living people to rescue, but all the humans are on board are not only dead but in a fossilized state. Of course, the creature that made them that way – a malevolent alien being that feeds on any other life form that crosses its path – latches onto Kane and makes its way into the Nostromo.

From then on Alien turns itself into pretty much a remake of the 1951 film The Thing – also a science-fiction tale about a military crew in an isolated environment having to battle a conscience-less space alien who thinks of them only as a food source – and indeed the huge success of Alien was used by director John Carpenter to get approval for a 1982 remake of The Thing that I thought was better than the earlier film (especially since Carpenter restored the monster’s shape-shifting ability it had had originally in the source story, John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?,” but which the screenwriter of the 1951 film, Charles Lederer, had deleted) – with Weaver essentially playing the role Margaret Sheridan had in the 1951 The Thing and Ian Holm as the Robert Cornthwaite character, the stupid scientist who wants to let the alien live and even protect it against the others because he regards it as a higher life form that needs to be respected. In fact, in a surprise twist towards the end of the movie that reveals a veiled but unmistakable anti-capitalist message, it turns out that Holm’s character is actually a robot that’s been programmed with a secret order, unknown to the rest of the crew, to keep the alien alive at all costs and fly it back to earth. “Crew considered expendable,” the order reads, and it’s clear that the company operating the Nostromo is interested in keeping it alive to develop as a bioweapon for military use.

Of course the most famous scene in the movie is the one in which the alien bursts through Ian Holm’s shoulder not only killing him but literally splashing the rest of the crew with his blood and guts. It’s become as iconic a scene of movie horror as Anthony Perkins knifing Janet Leigh to death in the shower in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and it’s been copied quite often – including a ludicrous low-budget ripoff from the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it had a real name instead of the preposterous concoction “SyFy”) in which the “alien” was so obviously a hand puppet you could see the fingers of the person working it through the all-too-sheer material. The scene was also spoofed in Mel Brooks’ 1987 spoof Spaceballs, which was mostly a takeoff of Star Wars – but Brooks couldn’t resist the temptation to have the alien burst through the man’s chest (John Hurt again!) wearing a straw hat, carrying a rattan cane and doing a tap dance to the song “My Ragtime Gal.” At the end the alien (created as a puppet by Carlo Rambaldi, who three years later would manufacture an animatronic puppet for a far more benevolent alien creature in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 fairy-tale masterpiece E.T., though enough scenes in this pre-CGI film were done with a human actor in costume that Bolaji Badejo gets screen credit for playing the alien) has knocked off all the crew members except Ripley.

She’s inside the ship’s shuttlecraft and thinks she’s got rid of the alien at long last, but it’s right in there with her and she has to zap it into space in hopes of annihilating it before she reaches Earth. I had misremembered the ending from that long-ago in-flight screening – I had assumed Weaver’s character had sacrificed herself to keep the alien from reaching Earth and turning its entire population into food – and on the basis of that recollection I had questioned the whole idea of making a sequel to Alien. In fact, there have been three: Aliens, Alien3 (that last numeral is supposed to be an exponent but I don’t know how to do those on my current word processor) and Alien: Resurrection, with increasingly preposterous plot gimmicks to explain the continued existence of Weaver’s character (in Alien: Resurrection she was actually supposed to be playing her own clone!). At least the next two Alien movies themselves helped launch the careers of future major directors – James Cameron and David Fincher, respectively – and however silly the sequels may have got (though Alien3 is the only one I’ve actually ever seen, and that was 20 years ago!), the first Alien holds up beautifully as an artful combination of science-fiction and horror, and a nicely honed piece of direction by Ridley Scott in what was only his second full-length film!

It’s In the Stars (MGM, 1938)

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

After Alien Turner Classic Movies showed an odd short film from MGM in 1938 called It’s In the Stars, about a college whose leading fraternity and sorority both hold simultaneous meetings at which they decide that partying and dating members of the opposite sex are only distracting them from their studies. So they decide to impose an outright ban on social contacts with class members of the opposite gender – which in our age of growing acceptance of Queer people (I use the term all-inclusively because I can’t stand the ludicrous and ever-growing set of initials, “LGBTQQIAA+” or whatever it’s up to this week, that in the same sort of perversion of language that gave us the equally bizarre “Latinx” has somehow become the standard designation for us) plays quite differently than it no doubt did in 1938. The most interesting aspect of this movie is its behind-the-camera personnel, who would quickly graduate to major films: director David Miller, writers Robert Lees and Fred Rinaldo (who would end up at Universal in the early 1940’s writing the star-making vehicles for Abbott and Costello), musical director David Snell and cinematographer Alfred Gilks. Gilks would later win a shared Academy Award for color cinematography for the 1951 MGM musical An American in Paris, for which he shot all but the last 20 minutes – but I suspect those last 20 minutes, a ballet staged to George Gershwin’s tone poem of the same title and stunningly directed by Vincente Minnelli and photographed by John Alton, really won the film its cinematography award.

Anyway, It’s In the Stars features dancer Johnny Downs (who was briefly under contract to Paramount, where they paired him with an even more forgotten talent, Eleanore Whitney, in an attempt to create their own competition to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and singer-dancer Eleanor Lynn, who are so attracted to each other they end up violating the no-dating rule and are caught when the school’s astronomy professor, Mr. Jones (Roger Converse) – who also seems to be moonlighting in psychology on the side – when he wants to show the class a projection of a lunar eclipse and there are Downs and Lynn making out in front of the telescope and casting their silhouettes on the screen on which Mr. Jones is projecting his image. The other students ostracize them and literally push them into the water at the base of the school’s fountain, but Mr. Jones is determined to break their silly no-dating rule. He tricks them into sponsoring a dance to raise money to renovate the school’s gym, only the dance is a bust at first: the students attend but just stand around the bandstand while the band plays a lackluster easy-listening version of “My Melancholy Baby.” The professor asks some of the students who know the terminology of swing what he should tell the bandleader to play hotter music, and the band members start to go to town on the same song. Downs and Lynn start patting their feet in time and ultimately end up dancing, and as the band starts running through swing standards of the period like “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Running Wild” the other students get the idea and soon the gym floor is a hopping dance venue. I kept expecting some prankster to pull the switch that would open the floor and dunk everybody in the swimming pool underneath – the same gag done so beautifully by Frank Capra in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – but they didn’t. Instead the film ends with all the newly coupled college students join Downs and Lynn for a reprise of the title song, with Downs and Lynn had previously performed as a dancing couple; it’s an O.K. piece of material (by Michael Cleary with lyrics by Max and Nathaniel Leaf) but, like the film itself, nothing special.

Tight Spot (Columbia, 1955)

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

The next movie on TCM’s Saturday schedule was Tight Spot, a 1955 late entry in the film noir cycle from Columbia with Edward G. Robinson as a federal prosecutor, Lloyd Hallett, determined to convict mob leader Benjamin Costain (Lorne Greene, of all people, leading a quite different sort of “family” than he did in his best-known role as patriarch Ben Cartwright on the TV series Bonanza) even though at the moment the only thing he has to nail him on is being an undesirable alien subject to deportation. I’d already watched this film with Charles in 2010 and commented on it on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/04/tight-spot-columbia-1955.html, and I feel pretty much the same about it now as I did then except I found myself liking the film’s unlikely star, Ginger Rogers, a lot better this time around. Rogers plays Sherry Conley, a woman who drifted into modeling as a teenager and ended up dating various criminals, including Costain associate Pete Tonelli (Alfred Linder), who took her on a yachting trip to South America with Costain on which Costain did something definitely contrary to U.S. law.

Just what Sherry did remains obscure (she explains she let her boyfriend stay with her when the police were looking for him for robbing a bank, but it’s uncear whether she was more involved in his crime than that) – the script is by William Bowers based on a play called Dead Pigeon by Leonard Kantor (and so much of the film takes place in tightly confined spaces its origins as a stage play are all too obvious) – but it’s given her a stint in a women’s prison that still has 11 months to go when the movie opens. Hallett suddenly needs a new witness against Costain because Tonelli, who was supposed to turn state’s evidence, has just been rubbed out by Costain’s gang and the case against Costain will be dismissed the next morning unless Hallett can find someone to put on the stand in his place. He has Sherry brought to a hotel suite near the courthouse with prison matron Mrs. Willoughby (Katherine Anderson) and basically holds her hostage overnight, using a combination of appeals to her social conscience (of which she has none), bribery (mostly with four-star haute cuisine meals delivered to her) and threats to get her to testify at the trial next morning. It’s a battle of wills further complicated when Costain’s gang gets word that Hallett is holding a secret witness and finds out where she is from a cop, Vince Striker (Brian Keith), whom at first we assume is an incorruptible rock of integrity but eventually we find that he’s been on Costain’s payroll for 10 years.

He’s instructed to leave the bathroom window of Sherry’s hotel suite open so Costain’s hit people can get in. At one point Hallett traces Sherry’s sister, Clara Moran (Eve McVeagh), and brings her to the hotel room hoping she can talk Sherry into confessing, but Clara makes it clear she doesn’t want Sherry to talk because Clara’s husband Roy owns a bar and would thus be an easy target for retaliation by Costain’s gang. When I first saw this movie I thought it would probably have been better if it had been made 20 years earlier and had used Rogers and Robinson when they were still contract players at Warner Bros. – Rogers had already played her share of hard-boiled, bitter dames and it’s easy to imagine her making that her “type” if her career hadn’t taken the spectacular detour it did, ending up at RKO and becoming Fred Astaire’s dancing partner. The main difference in my reaction to this film is I had a lot more respect for Rogers’ performance than I’d had 10 years ago: she made this the year after she’d played a murderess in the quite intriguing 1954 film Black Widow (essentially a murder mystery grafted onto the plot of All About Eve – if Margo Channing had killed that ungrateful little bitch Eve Harrington, the resuit would have been the 1954 Black Widow), and it’s obvious she was reading the calendar and realizing that as she aged she couldn’t keep playing ingenues and would have to look for more challenging character roles.

This made me shocked when TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller used his post-film comment to blast Rogers and also blast Columbia for casting her, suggesting that Judy Holliday, Jean Hagen or Gloria Grahame would have been better choices – though he conceded Grahame had already played a similar role in the 1953 film The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang and also about a hard-bitten woman who has the evidence authorities needed to bring down a major criminal enterprise. As it stands, Tight Spot is a tough movie, decently acted by the two leads and well directed by Phil Karlson, even though he seems a good deal more turned on when he can get the story out of the confines of the small rooms in which the play took place – and even though I can readily imagine my own favorite, Barbara Stanwyck (whose incredible versatility, matched by no one in her generation and only one actress, Meryl Streep, since has made her my all-time favorite female star), in the role (which she too had played equivalents of 20 years earlier in films like Ladies They Talk About), I think Ginger Rogers is just fine in the role, thank you! In fact, if anything I think Ginger turned in a better performance than Robinson, who seemed to be sleepwalking through his role; he too had played his character before (notably in the 1938 Columbia crime thriller I Am the Law, in which he played a law-school teacher turned special prosecutor to bus a particularly predatory “protection” racket) and he seemed to be pulling all the stops by rote rather than making this Edward-G.-Robinson-character-on-the-right-side-of-the-law any different from his previous ones.

Thunderbolt (Paramount, 1929)

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

My husband came home about halfway through Tight Spot and we ended up watching yet another movie, one I had recently ordered because I was startled to see it had actually made it to a home-video format (a Blu-Ray from the redoutable Kino Lorber enterprise): Thunderbolt, a 1929 crime drama from Paramount and Josef von Sternberg’s first sound film. Sternberg had started his film career in 1925 with The Salvation Hunters, about a group of lowlifes eking out a living on a barge. It was at a time before the coming of sound, when making an independent movie was relatively easy to do; all you needed was a camera, some actors, some interesting locations and a director with an eye for dramatic lighting and composition, and Sternberg had all four. Charlie Chaplin saw the film and hired Sternberg to direct a film called The Woman of the Sea starring his former leading lady, Edna Purviance, in an attempt to resuscitate her career (while he pulled the female lead from The Salvation Hunters, Georgia Hale, and made her his co-star in one of his greatest films, The Gold Rush), but he decided it was too weak to release. Sternberg got a contract from MGM but got fired in the middle of making a movie called The Exquisite Sinner (he was yet one more individualistic director who couldn’t hack MGM’s factory-like production system).

Paramount picked him up and assigned him to finish a movie called Children of Divorce with Clara Bow and Gary Cooper, and given the amount of script he still had to shoot and the limited time he had available he decreed that for the rest of the shoot the cast and the crew would literally live at the studio, sleeping on cots and grabbing whatever rest, and whatever food, they could get when they weren’t actually needed on camera. The actors ended up hating him but the film was a success, and so Paramount’s production chief, B. P. Schulberg (father of writer Budd Schulberg, who based his anti-Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? on the man who forced his dad out of that job, Emmanuel Cohen) assigned him to a movie called Underworld based on a story by Ben Hecht, one of a number of writers who had started out as journalists covering organized crime in Chicago in the 1920’s and then got called by Hollywood to write screenplays about it. Underworld set the template for the gangster movie as a genre and made stars of Sternberg and its leading actors, George Bancroft and Evelyn Brent. Sternberg followed it up with The Last Command, starring Emil Jannings (billed by Paramount as “the world’s greatest actor” following his international triumphs in the films The Last Laugh and Variety) as a Czarist Russian general who, after the 1917 Revolution, ends up in Hollywood making a movie about the Revolution directed by the Bolshevik (William Powell) who had him arrested and exiled; and The Docks of New York, which starred Bancroft as a dock worker who rescues a woman from suicide and then feels responsible for her.

Then sound came in, and Sternberg returned to gangsters as a theme in Thunderbolt, this time casting George Bancroft as bank robber and killer Jim Lang, nicknamed “Thunderbolt” by criminal associates, crime reporters and, ultimately, the police. The film opens with Thunderbolt’s ex-girlfriend, whom he calls “Ritzie” even though her actual name is “Mary” (yet another example of screenwriters – in this case Charles and Jules Furthman, with Sternberg and Herman J. Mankiewicz providing additional dialogue and Mankiewicz’ brother Joe credited with writing titles, presumably for the alternative silent version issued to theatres that still hadn’t wired for sound – using the Mother of Christ’s name to denote a particularly innocent and “virginal” female character) and who’s played by Fay Wray, on a date with a young bank teller named Bob Moran (Richard Arlen) who lives at home with his mother (Eugenie Besserer, also Al Jolson’s mother in the pioneering sound film The Jazz Singer but looking oddly younger here). The opening shot shows Bob and Mary necking in a park – and Sternberg has a black cat walk past them to indicate that they’re going to have some pretty severe troubles on their way to a happy ending. Their main problem is Thunderbolt, who doesn’t take rejection very well; he’s sworn to get Ritzie back to him by any means necessary, and also to kill the man who had the temerity to take her away from him. The two lovers part uncertainly, not wanting to be seen together for fear one of Thunderbolt’s agents will report back to him, and Mary gets into a cab – only what she thinks is a cab is really a police van.

Then we get a scene that seemed to anticipate the central plot of Tight Spot, the movie from 26 years later which we’d just seen: the ex-girlfriend of a mobster being browbeaten by police and prosecutors trying to get a line on Thunderbolt’s whereabouts so they can arrest him. Fay Wray’s performance is one of the highlights of this film; she usually got cast as innocent ingenues but here she’s a tough, hard-boiled broad, wanting to be rid of Thunderbolt but either too loyal to him, too scared of him, or both to want to talk. The first half of the film is about Thunderbolt’s ham-handed attempts to get Mary/Ritzie back, including taking her to a Black cabaret where he starts a fight by squirting an obnoxious woman with a seltzer bottle and getting her companion mad at him. (Intriguingly, Sternberg has the club’s singer heard on the soundtrack but we don’t get to see her, Theresa Harris, until Thunderbolt and Mary are thrown out of the club – and the band behind her is Curtis Mosby’s Blue Blowers, the top Black jazz band in Los Angeles and therefore a go-to group for moviemakers needing a Black band for a film scene.) Thunderbolt traces Bob – who’s already lost his bank job because the bank manager gave him an ultimatum, either end his relationship with a bank robber’s girlfriend or leave, and he left (he has a rather blasé attitude towards losing his job, but then this film was released June 20, 1929, four months before the stock market crash that kicked off the worldwide Great Depression, so this is still a 1920’s rather than a 1930’s Zeitgeist movie) – and goes to the apartment building where Mary is staying (platonically) with him and his mom.

But his attempt to kill her is blocked by a neighborhood dog, whom Thunderbolt can’t get out of his way – Bancroft resorts to going on all fours and playing with the dog in what was clearly Sternberg’s idea of a comic relief sequence, albeit a grim one reflecting the movie’s overall cynicism) – and he’s finally arrested by the police, who happen on him while he’s still stuck with that damned dog. The second half of Thunderbolt takes place on Death Row, where Thunderbolt has been sent after being convicted and sentenced to death, and what’s been a competent and reasonably interesting gangster movie up until now becomes even better. The main intrigue of the second part of the film is Thunderbolt’s determination to get Bob Moran killed even though he’s facing execution himself, and he goes about that by having his gang members write Bob a phony letter, ostensibly from the bank manager who rired him, offering him a meeting presumably to discuss reinstatement, then robbing the bank themselves at the precise time Bob is going to be there, shooting a police officer and planting the gun on Bob so he’ll be accused of the murder, convicted of it and sentenced to death himself. Eventually Thunderbolt has a crisis of conscience and decides to confess the truth to the warden, but his gang members are so convinced Thunderbolt wants Bob dead they assume it’s merely a trick so Thunderbolt and Bob will be out of their cells at the same time and Thunderbolt can shiv him to death – and Sternberg and his writers keep us in suspense until the very end whether Thunderbolt means to murder Bob at the last minute or is letting him go free and back to Mary at the end.

Once the film gets to Death Row, Sternberg and his writers ramp up the cynicism big-time – and Sternberg was apparently as cynical off-screen as he was in his movie. When a Paramount executive asked him to put in some musical numbers because in the early days of sound just about every movie had at least some musical elements, Sternberg said, “Fine. I’ll have a Black convict singing spirituals on Death Row.” That’s just what he did – only he went even farther. Not only did he have a Black convict singing spirituals (and accompanying himself on a piano delivered to his cell by special dispensation of the prison warden – played by Tully Marshall, the only person in this cast besides Fay Wray who worked for both Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg, as a harried bureaucrat instead of the cadaverous figure of evil he was in Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly), he has some of the white prisoners organize a barber-shop quartet. When Thunderbolt arrives on Death Row one of the barber-shop quartet members asks him if he sings tenor – “I kill tenors,” he says – and they explain that their previous tenor’s death sentence has just been carried out and they need to replace him. There’s even an inmate orchestra that assembles whenever there’s an execution and plays background music as the prisoner is led to the death chamber. (This was at a time when producers frowned on the whole idea of background music, thinking it was an out-of-date holdover from the silent era, so the only way you could have music in your movie was if it was “sourced” – if it came from a live band, a radio, a record or some other visible source. Sternberg remained reticent about background music even after it became standard in sound films: one of his most effective scenes, the ending of his 1930 film Morocco, is scored only with the drums of the French regiment, the natural noises it would make marching into the desert, and the sounds of the sandstorm: no music.)

Technically, Thunderbolt is very much a movie of its time – Sternberg didn’t ride herd on the actors and sound people as much as some of the other early sound directors (notably Vidor, Mamoulian, Milestone and Capra) did, and though Thunderbolt is relatively free of the maddening pauses between lines that afflicted too many early talkies, it’s still a highly stentorian movie. George Bancroft seems to have thought that he’d project menace by speaking his lines slowly and ominously – a far cry from later gangster stars like Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, who spat out their lines at near-warp speed and often snarled them – and Richard Arlen, who become an accomplished sound film actor later, still seems to be finding his sea legs and learning how to act with his voice as well as his face and body. At the same time, Thunderbolt is so cynical in its overall depiction of the criminal justice system and the complexity of its characters it almost seems like a 1960’s movie. I have a boxed set of Sternberg’s last three silents on order and after Thunderbolt I look forward to seeing them at long last (Underworld in particular is one of those movies I’ve heard about literally for decades without ever having had the chance to see), and I had thought of waiting on Thunderbolt until I could show Charles and I its silent predecessors, but I was too curious to want to wait and I ran Thunderbolt immediately – and it’s an intriguing film that marked the end of that phase of Sternberg’s career. The next year he’d travel to Germany on a one-film deal with the big UFA studio and make The Blue Angel, which was supposed to be Emil Jannings’ comeback picture after Paramount had fired “the world’s greatest actor” because they didn’t think he could speak English well enough (and I’ve long suspected there was a certain amount of I’ll-show-them in Jannings’ decision to play a professor teaching an English-as-a-foreign-language class to German students), only instead of Jannings’ performance as a professor ruined by falling in love with a cabaret entertainer, the player they remembered was Marlene Dietrich as the girl who ruined him.