American Song Contest, episode 5 (Brain Academy, Propagate Content, Universal Television Alternative Studios, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 I watched episode five of the NBC-TV series American Song Contest, the fifth and final “qualifying round” in which all 56 U.S. jurisdictions (the 50 states, five territories and Washington, D.C., which as a “federal district” is in a separate, anomalous category all its own). To some extent, I share my husband Charles’ criticism of this show that allk too many of the songs sound alike – there are a few rap songs and even fewer country songs (and most of those from the places you’d expect, the South and Southwest), but most are in the dance-pop genre that currently dominates American popular music. Charles also pointed out that there are no real differences between the states in terms of musical culture – though California was represented by Sweet Taboo, a group of three young Mexican-American girls (they really don’t look old enough to be women, even though one of them was wearing a halter top which showed off her little breasts), two of whom sing while the third one rapped. They did the inevitable Spanish-language chorus at the end of a song that is otherwise in English and is called “Keys to the Kingdom.” They were essentially the female equivalent of a “boy band” and their song was nice, pleasant and easy enough on the ears without moving or touching the heart in any way.

They played second on the program, following Justin Jesso from Illinois, who recalled that his grandfather was a lookout man for Al Capone in the 1920’s, when Chicago music actually had an edge to it. Jesso’s song was called “Lifeline,” and it was closer to the rock end of the pop-rock spectrum than most of last night’s material but still was a pretty inoffensive and bland piece. Afterwards came Andrew Sheppard from Idaho, who sand a country-folk song called “Steady Machine” that I wouldn’t have minded so much if he hadn’t been trying so hard to be the next Bob Dylan – complete with a floppy hat on his head – with bits and pieces of John Mellencamp as well. The next performer was Khalisol from New Mexico, who describes his music as “soul-hop” but in practice that means the same mixture of R&B singing and rapping a lot of young performers do – and his song, “Drop,” was once again a piece of nice, inoffensive pop music. Next up was a country singer from Missouri named Halie (pronounced “Hayley,” by the way) who did a song called “Better Things” that was a bit unusual for a country breakup song in that instead of crying in her beer (or something stronger) over her man having dumped her, she’s actually glad to be rid of him and his no-good ways. (It’s not unusual for breakup songs in other genres to take that tack, but usually country singers go for the miseries of being alone rather than the joys of being rid of someone.)

The next singer was another one-named person, Tenelle, from the U.S. territory of American Samoa – which, by the way, the Samoans themselves pronounce as “Sam’wha,” with the “o” silent, while mainland Americans not only pronounce the “o” but make the syllable containing it the most stressed: “Suh-MOW-uh.” Tenelle and his parents talked a lot about “fa’a Samoa,” the mix of rules and customs that govern life on the island, a term I’ve heard elsewhere only in tne literature on Robert and Frances Flaherty’s film Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age, filmed in 1923-24 but not released until 1926 (and not to be confused with the recent Disney computer-animated monstrosity which took the name of a classic in vain), and what he came up with in his song, “Full Circle,” was a masterpiece, full of emotion and soul and the standout track from this episode the way Rhode Island’s Hueston did from the first program, North Dakota’s Chloe Fredericks on the second, Tennessee’s Tyler Braden on the third and Arizona’s Los Marias from the fourth. It’s true that Tenelle’s music didn’t sound at all Polynesian – if I’d heard the song “blind” I’d have guessed the singer was African-American and had grown up in a Black church – but that didn’t matter. What did was the sheer power and drama Tenelle brought to the song.

The next singer was John Morgan from North Carolina, who has had at least a toehold on a major career – he’s opened for Jason Aldean and co-wrote a song with Aldean and Carrie Underwood called “If I Didn’t Love You” – and he wrote a country ballad called “Right in the Middle” that, like so much of the music on this show, was pleasant and inoffensive but also oddly lacking in soul. The next performer was Josh Panda from Vermont – his real name was Joshua Pender and his Web page stresses how hard he’s had to work to overcome a conservative upbringing and become his own person. Between that and the feminine persona he projects on stage, that would sound like the life story of a Gay man – except he has two chidren (though on the segment that introduced him, there was no sign of a significant other, either female or male) – and he sang his song, “Roller Coaster,” in a surprisingly storing falsetto. (It didn’t help that the Partridge Family, of all people, did a better song called “Roller Coaster” on their last album, The Partridge Family Bulletin Board.) The next artist was Jason J. from the island of Guam, though he moved to Los Angeles to study music in 2010 and he’s been on the mainland so long it's pretty much wiped out any specifically “Guamanian” aspects to his music. Like Sabya from the Northern Marianas Islands in episode three, Jason J. made me think, “This is what Jimmy Buffett would have sounded like if he’d been born in Polynesia.”

The next performer was Ada LeAnn from Michigan, 17-year-old daughter of an auto worker, who came up with a quite good song called “Natalie” about a young woman whose boyfriend is seeing two women at once, her and someone called Natalie with whom she feels totally unable to compete. Charles said he liked the song but wished it could have been sung by a singer with a harder-edged voice, like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick or Melanie (and the last two, at least, are still alive, though Slick is retired), but the singer Ada LeAnn reminded me of was Lesley Gore. In her teens, Gore produced a star-making hit, “It’s My Party,” which covered the same basic situation as “Natalie” but buzzed with anger at being two-timed (and later Gore made a follow-up record, “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” in which the girl who’d taken her boyfriend away got her comeuppance), whereas LeAnn’s approach seemed rather mopey and resigned by comparison. (The song also reminded me of David Bowie’s “Letter to Hermione,” especially a line that reminded me of the heart-rending line in Bowie’s song, “Does he ever call my name/Just by mistake.”) Apparently the judges on the 56-member (one from each state) panel of music professionals thought a lot more highly of her than I did, because they voted LeAnn to top place and an automatic slot in the semi-finals, which begin next week. Our final contestant was a “ringer,” a professional named Sisqó with several Grammy nominations under his belt, who performed a song called “It’s Up” with a mixture of singing and rapping that once again did little for me.

The Endgame: "All That Glitters" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the American Song Contest I watched the latest episode of The Endgame, “All That Glitters,” and it was by far the most preposterous one yet. We’re expected to believe that the President of the United States, Andrew Wright (Sasha Roiz), has somehow managed to steal literally half a billion dollars in gold bars and substitute ordinary clay bricks painted to look like gold. Somehow the series’ principal villainess, Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin, of the gravity-defying bra – I suspect that evcery straight guy in the country who’s watching this has the hots for her, just as when Christopher Meloni was still on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit I joked that the show’s fan base consisted of two groups: Gay guys who thought Meloni was hot – me definitely included – and straight guys who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot), has got wind of this. She figured out a way to expose the President as a crook by planting a bomb made to look like a gold ingot in the vault in New York where the fake “gold” is stored. Instead of an explosive, the bomb contains water, which releases as a mist and causes the fake ingots literally to melt away. She also has her minions kidnap three people in the Wright administration, including chief of staff Julia Swanstrom (Genevieve Ellis) and FBI official Johnathan Doak (Noah Bean), who’s been lobbying Swanstrom to get the President to fire FBI director Rogelio Reál (Mark Damon Espinoza) and appoint Doak in his place so he can in turn fire the show’s principal heroine, FBI agent Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathé – a Black woman, by the way).

Fedorova's agents wrap Swanstrom in cellophane wrap (I’ve known people who have that done to them on purpose as an act of submissive S/M) and locks her in a tank, where she intends to drown her by pumping in gold paint. The idea is that Swanstrom is the legal owner of the plant where the clay ingot replicas were made – and where nobody bothered to fire them, which would have made them impervious to water/ She bought the plant through a shell corporation set up by President Wright, who was using her as an innocent front (telling her he was helping her buy the plant to use the clay to make filters for water in developing oountries) to steal the government’s gold reserves. This begs an interesting question which writer Margarita Matthews never bothered to answer: what on earth would he do with all that gold? The expansiveness of the plot reminds me of Fritz Lang’s and Thea von Harbou’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, in which the titular super-villain, was trying to destabilize the European economy by, among other things, having his minions steal real currency from bank vaults and substitute counterfeit bills of their own manufacture – but at least Lang and von Harbou knew when to stop, so their plot actually made sense. I’m sure writer Matthews and director Omar Madha never stopped to think of how President Wright and his gang would move that much gold, where they would store it, and above all what they could do with it, since it’s not exactly easy to show up at a grocery store and pay fpr something with a gold ingot.

Along the way there are the usual subplots, including one in which Elena and her husband Sergei Vodianov (Costa Ronin) hide their five-year-old daughter with a foster mother (a flashback sequence) and another in which Sergei, in a federal prison in the show’s present, gets screwed up when his confederate, Val Turner’s ex-husband Owen (Kamal Andelo Bolden), who was a fellow FBI agent and ended up in prison when Elena Fedorova got him framed for allegedly taking bribes from a drug gang, ends up in solitary confinement, though he’s released from solitary and put back in the general population at the end of the program. There’s also a blogger called “The Serial Skeptic” (Keith Nobbs), who takes up Elena’s side and organizes giant demonstratioms outside Fort Totten, the Civil War-era installation where she’s being held, demanding her freedom. If nothing else, The Endgame is a great vehicle for the Donald Trum[ years; “The Serial Skeptic” is obviously inspired by the real-life “Q,” whose QAnon Web site has, according to polls, convinced a full one-fourth of the American population that the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of pedophile cannibals and Donald Trump has been anointed by God to hold them to account and order summary mass executions as soon as he regains the presidency, either in 2024 or sooner than that because they also believe the “fraudulent” results of the 2020 election will be overturned and Trump restored to office any day now. The whole thesis of this show that everyone – or almost everyone – in the U.S. government is corrupt and we need Elena Fedorova (or Donald Trump) on our side to reveal their secrets is also very Trumpian; this show – probably unwittingly on the part of its makers – reveals the sicknesses that has led many Americans to a state of cynical disbelief in authorities and a conviction that what is needed is an autocratic revolution to cleanse America of the evils of the “Deep State.”

King of Kings (Samuel Bronston Productions, MGM, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Easter Sunday “feature” on Turner Classic Movies was a showing of the Biblical epic King of Kings – not, alas, the Cecil B. DeMille silent film from 1927, a guilty pleasure of mine since it is so over-the-top (it begins with Mary Magdalene in the midst of her den of sin, ordering her servants to “Harness my zebras, a gift of the Nubian king” – though, like most movie “zebras,” they are just horses with stripes painted on them to make them look like zebras, an irony since actual zebras are closer to goats than horses), mostly in black-and-white but with a stunning depiction of the Resurrection in two-strip Technicolor. The title of the 1927 film is actually The King of Kings, with the article, but this version is from 1961 and abbreviated the title just to King of Kings, without the “The.” This film was produced by Samuel Bronston on his usual stomping grounds, Spain (two years later, when he made a film called 55 Days at Peking about the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, he hired so many personnel from Chinese restaurants as extras that during his shoot it became virtually impossible to get a Chinese meal in Spain), though as one imdb,com “Trivia” contributor noted, his locations looked an awful lot like the traditional desert locales in the American Southwest used by plenty of Western producers over the years. (Four years after King of Kings, George Stevens would produce and direct his own biopic of Jesus Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and shoot it in familiar Western locations, including Monument Valley, Utah, where John Ford had worked so often with impeccable results, artistically and commercially.)

Producer Bronston hired Nicholas Ray to direct, even though Ray’s previous films had generally been about modern-day people, usually young men living lives of alienation: They Live by Night, On Dangerous Ground, Bigger than Life and his best-known film, Rebel Without a Cause. In fact, Ray and Rebel star James Dean had talked about forming a production company together before Dean’s sudden and tragic death in an auto accident on September 30, 1955, and one of the many might-have-beens in Dean’s sadly truncated career was whether he might have been cast as Jesus if he’d still been alive when this film was made. Ray was obviously looking for a young-rebel type as Jesus, and the actor he did pick was Jeffrey Hunter, who was 33 at the time of filming (the same age as Jesus when he was crucified) but looked so much younger wags jokingly called the film I Was a Teenage Jesus. At least part of the problem may have been that when the film was previewed, audiences reacted derisively to the sight of Jeffrey Hunter’s chest hair, so the studio, MGM, ordered retakes in which Hunter’s chest was shaved – and so were his underarms.

King of Kings began as a personal project for director John Farrow (Mia Farrow’s father), who concocted a script based entirely on the four Gospels and using only dialogue from the Bible. His script was later declared unfilmable, and a new one was written by Philip Yordan, who “made his bones” with the script for Monogram’s Dillinger in 1945 and was known at the time mostly for films noir: Whistle Stop, The Chase and Suspense (all 1946), House of Strangers (1949), its Westernized remake Broken Lance (1954), The Harder They Fall (1956 – Humphrey Bogart’s last film) and a previous collaboration with Nicholas Ray on Johnny Guitar (1954, the sort of film noir in Western drag that had been box office since the success of Winchester .73 four years earlier). Among Yordan’s quirkier challenges was being the first screenwriter who had to write dialogue for a talking Jesus: not since the 1927 DeMille silent The King of Kings had Jesus’s face and body been shown on screen. Previous sound films that referenced him had depicted Jesus only as a shadowy figure with an occasional hand on someone else’s shoulder. MGM had concerns that what would now be called the “faith-based audience” would regard it as sacreligious that Jesus Christ would actually be played by a recognizable actor who would be shown speaking real lines, but that was the least of their problems with King of Kings.

The film as it stands is a leaden spectacle, with Ray’s direction occasionally lightening things up but all too many of the setups look like the banal religious scenes that get painted on velvet. The original cinematographer was Franz Planer, but he fell ill with heat exhaustion from the desert locations and two other cameramen, Milton Krasner and Miguel Berenguer (did I mention that this film was shot in Spain?) took his place. As things turned out, Nicholas Ray didn’t make it to the end of the shoot, either; he was reported to have had a “nervous breakdown” – though other sources say he was feuding with Bronston throughout the production until Bronston got tired of the arguments and fired him – and additional scenes were directed by Charles Walters, the inoffensive hack who had made the last Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film, The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) and had done similar fill-in work on Gigi (1958), directing about one-third of that film and shooting retakes in the U.S. of scenes originally shot by the director of record, Vincente Minnellli (Liza Minnelli’s father), in France. Reviewers at the time greeted King of Kings with withering scorn, pointing to the intense close-ups of Jesus with bright blue eyes and the overall artificiality of the spectacle.

Seen today, the biggest surprise is the prominence writer Yordan gave to Barabbas (Harry Guardino), who in this telling of the tale becomes a sort of anti-Jesus, essentially saying that the only way to defeat the Romans and get them the hell out of the Holy Land is by violence. The arguments between Jesus and Barabbas eerily anticipate the ones that would take place later in the 1960’s among African-American civil rights activists between the followers of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other supporters of nonviolent resistance and the so-called “Black Power” advocates who urged the Black community to arm themselves and prepare for a violent struggle with the forces of white supremacy. Just how the Blacks would gain the military capability to take on the U.S. armed forces and win a civil war was a question the “Black Power” advocates never really answered, and the attempts by the Black Panther Party and others on the “Black Power” side of the argument ended ignominiously in slaughters – just as Barabbas’ attempt to mount an armed assault on the palace of Pontius Pilate (Hurd Hatfield) and Herod Antipas (Frank Thring) ends up with them being mowed down en masse by Roman archers. The film is also a broad-strokes depiction of the brutality of imperialism – it was made just 16 years after the end of World War II and it’s hard to miss the parallels between what the Romans were doing to the Jews in this era and what the Nazis did to them nearly 2,000 years later.

In fact, watching this film today it’s hard to miss the similarity between what the Romans did to the people of Judea and what the Russians are now doing to the people of Ukraine: not only killing them en masse but obliterating their culture as well as their physical infrastructure. There’s an early scene in which the Roman general Pompey (Conrado San Martín) leads his army into the Temple of Solomon and draws back the curtain, hoping and expecting to find a great storehouse of golden statues he can melt down and steal – and instead there’s only a nondescript stone altar. The bits of King of Kings that work – including the fictitious character of Lucius (Ron Randell), a Roman soldier who encounters Jesus when Jesus was 12 and offers to adopt him as an apprentice (an offer a rather indignant Mary, played by Irish actress Siobhan McKenna, turns down) and doesn’t report him to the authorities even though his birth was not recorded in the Roman census, thanks to Mary’s and her husband Joseph’s [Gérard Tichy] having got a tip that Herod the Great [Grégoire Aslan] had ordered the slaughter of all male children two and under born in Bethlehem, and they fled to Egypt (though in this film only Mary and the baby Jesus flee and Joseph stays behind). I liked to joke during the (first) Trump administration that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were asylum seekers, fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution, and the Egyptian authorities were a lot easier on their asylum claim than the Trump administration.

Mention should also be made of the third-party narration that runs throughout this movie, written by Ray Bradbury and delivered by Orson Welles – both of them uncredited – and in particular Dwight Macdonald’s scorn that the narration whitewashed the two Jewish characters who were explicitly named as villains in the Gospels, Herod the Great and Judas Iscariot (Rip Torn). According to Bradbury’s narration, Herod was “an Arab of the Bedouin tribe” whom the Romans had installed as a sort of puppet ruler of Judea, and Judas betrayed Jesus because he hoped Jesus would work a miracle about himself and save himself at the last minute from the Cross. Macdonald, who was obviously feeling raw at the criticism he’d got from Jews over his review of the 1959 Ben-Hur, in which he’d criticized the film for having let the Jews off the hook and blaming the Crucifixion exclusively on the Romans, addressed the topic again when he reviewed King of Kings. He said that, “as a lapsed Presbyterian, I had assumed that the Biblical narration of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus was correct. Since then I have learned, by the chancy ways journalists learn things, that a good case can be made that the Bible writers played down the responsibility of the Romans and played up the responsibility of the Jews. So I’m willing to admit that the matter is obscure and my critics may be right about the historical facts. But I’m still not willing to admit that my error – if indeed it was such – is evidence of any anti-Semitic prejudices on my part.” (I’m quoting the above from memory here but I think I have the gist of what he wrote correctly.) Later, in his equally scathing review of The Greatest Story Ever Told, MacDonald wrote, “There are secular cows and there are sacred cows, and Israel is as much a sacred cow today (1965) as the Soviet Union was in the 1930’s,” when all too many progressives whitewashed the Soviet horrors out of sympathy for the socialist project.

It’s also worth noting that the scene in which Jesus calls out the people who want to stone the woman taken in adultery and says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” was rather blah and did not have the impact it did in DeMille’s 1927 silent (in which Jesus actually uses his staff to trace in front of each person the name of their sin), and while the whole sequence of Herod Antipas promising his stepdaughter, the Princess Salomé (Brigid Bazlen), anything she wants if she’ll dance for him – and she demands the head of John the Baptist (Robert Ryan) on a silver platter – stems, as an imdb.com “Trivia” contributor acknowledged, from Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé rather than the Bible, the film omits Wilde’s account of Salomé’s exit (Herod Antipas orders his soldiers to crush Salomé to death with their shields because he’s so disgusted with her sexual by-play with John the Baptist’s head), and it occurred to me that though Miklós Rósza’s score for the overall film is quite good (except for the God-awful choruses which weigh down some of the cues), he didn’t come up with music for Salomé to dance to anywhere near the quality of Richard Strauss’s in his infamous opera based on Wilde’s play.

The Méliès Mystery (ARTE, Lobster Films, Steamboat Films, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Much to my amazement, just after showing the 1961 King of Kings TCM ran a “Silent Sunday Showcase” episode consisting not of the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille The King of Kings but a freshly restored color version of Georges Méliès’ pioneering 1902 film A Trip to the Moon followed by a documentary, over an hour long, called The Méliès Mystery (Le Mystère Méliès), directed by Eric Lange and co-written by him and Serge Bromberg, who also narrated the French version. It was made in 2021 for French television and this English version was narrated by Leonard Maltin, an acceptable enough choice. The film told me some facts about Méliès’ life and rather sad career I hadn’t known before, such as his father was a successful shoe manufacturer and expected Georges to follow him into the family business. Alas, Méliès was fascinated by vaudeville shows and in particular by stage magic; in 1888, at age 27, he cashed out his share of his father’s inheritance and used the money to buy the old Theâtre Robert-Houdin, which had been built in the early 19th century by the pioneering French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. Méliès put a lot of money into restoring the old theatre and putting on magic shows, though as with a lot of his later projects he spent too much money on them and they didn’t turn a profit.

In the 1890’s Méliès saw one of the earliest demonstrations of moving pictures projected on a screen by Louis and August Lumière, and he immediately fell in love with the new medium. He bought a movie camera from the Lumières and one day when he was shooting a typical Parisian street scene, the camera jammed briefly. When he developed his film, a horse-drawn cart had magically disappeared – and Méliès realized that with film he could easily and quickly do illusions that took hours of preparation on stage. He launched a company called Star-Film – though he made the mistake of never actually incorporating it, therefore he personally was responsible for its debts when the popularity of trick films started to wane in the early 1910’s – and incorporated its logo into every movie as a futile attempt to keep his works from being pirated. One book I read about early filmmaking told a story about a U.S. company that got hold of one of Méliès’ films, duplicated it and tried to sell it to a distributor from France. Unfortunately for them the “distributor” was Méliès himself, who recognized his own product and angrily chewed out the thieves who had tried to sell his own work back to him.

Méliès lived on a large estate in Montreuil, France and built two film studios on the grounds; they were made entirely of glass because, since artificial lights weren’t yet bright or powerful enough to use for filmmaking, all movies in the early days were shot by daylight. When Thomas A. Edison organized the Motion Picture Patents Company, Méliès and his brother Gaston, his U.S. distributor, made the mistake of joining it – only by the rules of Edison’s trust, Méliès’ French-made films couldn’t be shown in the U.S. So Gaston Méliès started making his own films in the U.S. and concentrated on Westerns and other genres of popular entertainment – and since both brothers signed their works “G. Méliès,” there’s ongoing confusion about which films so signed were made by which brother. World War I drove the final nail into the coffin of Georges Méliès’ business and also ended the market for the kinds of whimsical fantasies his studio had specialized in – even though Méliès had made the first political film ever, The Wandering Jew (1905), and he was inspired by the Alfred Dreyfus case and the tale of a French army officer wrongfully convicted of espionage and treason because he was Jewish.

In 1923 he was forced to sell his Montreuil estate and, in a fit of panic and rage, destroyed the negatives and prints of all 520 films he was storing there. By the early 1930’s he and his wife were reduced to running a toy shop in the Gare Montparnasse train station. When Henri Langlois of the Cinemathéque Française tried to engage a showing of Méliès’ works to get him some income, Méliès had to admit that he didn’t have any copies and had no idea where any prints of his films were. Eventually a few turned up here and there, mostly from private collections, and many of the films actually had survived courtesy of Gaston Méliès’ demand for pristine negatives and prints he could use for U.S. releases. Georges Méliès actually invented a camera with two lenses that could shoot on two strips of film simultaneously – which at first suggested that in addition to everything else (including inventing the whole art of “special effects” on screen) Méliès might have been the pioneer of 3-D movies. (At the time 3-D movies were a dream but 3-D still photos were an established commercial product, sold as two adjacent images which you saw through a stereoscopic viewer that melded the two images into one and gave an illusion of depth.) The reason for the two-lensed camera was quite different: it was simply to give Gaston Méliès back in the U.S. a duplicate negative of equal quality to the ones Georges was making prints from for their French releases.

Meliès’ American negatives ended up being purchased by Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies producer Leon Schlesinger and eventually were donated to a film archive that is in the process of restoring them frame-by-frame, after first using a chemical to soften up the original negatives or prints that due to environmental issues has been banned in the U.S. but is still allowed in France. Today, according to a post at Lost Media Archives [https://lostmediaarchive.fandom.com/wiki/Georges_Méliès_Missing_Films_(1890s-1910s)], 231 of Méliès’ 520 films are known to exist in some form, though it’s unclear just how many are actually watchable today, and the 1902 color version of A Trip to the Moon is intriguing but lacked the crispness and definition of the black-and-white version – at least partly because the colors were hand-painted onto the original film, an early and brave attempt at colorization.

Wrath: A "Seven Deadly Sins" Story (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched two Lifetime movies back-to-back starting at 8: Wrath: A “Seven Deadly Sins” Story and The Wrong High School Sweetheart. Wrath was one of those annoying cases in which Lifetime hadn’t briefed the imdb.com Web site anything about this movie, including the names of the director, the writer and the principal cast members, but I was able to get information from other sources online – notably an interview with the film’s star, Michelle Williams, in the New York Post (https://nypost.com/2022/04/16/michelle-williams-on-sex-sins-and-the-wrath-of-tina-knowles/) on April 16. First, one thing the interview put me right about was that this was not the white Michelle Williams who co-starred with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain and became his off-screen partner and the mother of his daughter Matilda. No, this was the Black Michelle Williams who was Beyoncé’s partner in Destiny’s Child, the singing group that made her a star and launched her career. (The third member of the vocal trio was Kelly Rowland, and back then Beyoncé was still using her full name, Beyoncé Knowles.)

Wrath was one of a series of “inspirational” novels by Victoria Christopher Murray, a Black author whose books draw on religion in general and the Bible in particular, and she announced some years ago that she was working on a series which would cover each of the seven deadly sins, though so far the only ones she’s written are Lust, Envy, Wrath and Greed. The first two were filmed by Lifetime last year and Wrath and Greed were the follow-ups, though neither Lifetime’s nor Murray’s Web sites offers evidence that she’s done stories about the other three sins. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica Web site (https://www.britannica.com/topic/seven-deadly-sins), the other three sins are pride, gluttony and sloth, and though one can readily imagine suite a nice book about pride, sloth would be a good deal less interesting and gluttony would be almost impossible (though the above-cited source say that “gluttony” includes drunkenness as well, and that has inspired plenty of interesting stories, including The Lost Weekend.)

Murray considers it part of her mission to propagandize for God in general and Christianity in particular, but there’s a good deal less open religiosity in Wrath than there was in Lust or Envy (at least according to the way Lifetime’s writers and directors have dramatized them). Basically it’s yet another Lifetime tale about the boyfriend turned stalker from hell: the heroine is Chastity Jeffries (Michelle Williams), aspiring attorney who’s just made junior partner in her law firm and is the daughter of legendary civil-rights attorney Victor Jeffries. (The online documentation does not mention the name of the actor playing the father, but he’s damned good, bringing real power and authority to what would in lesser hands have been a clichéd nothing role.) She meets a white attorney named Xavier Collins (Antonio Cupo) and starts a flaming affair with him including him fucking her on their first date – she tells us she doesn’t usually trick out with men she’s just met, but was willing to make an exception because they were both attorneys, they both had the same birth date and they start a relationship that is “serlous” enough she’s thinking of introducing him to her parents, Victor and Sarah (Tina Knowles, Beyoncé’s real-life mother and a longtime family friend: Michelle Williams apparently texted Beyoncé saying, “Your mom is killing it!”).

Only things start going wrong when they have an argument that ends with Xavier literally pushing Chastity off the sidewalk and onto the street, where a car nearly runs her down (the sequence looked oddly like one of those commercials advertising the new cars that are equipped to stop automatically just in time to avoid an accident). Xavier tells Chastity that he survived child abuse at the hands of his grandmother, who raised him after his mom died. Then Xavier’s career takes a quick plummet when the management of the law firm he works for fires him from a major case for making a stupid mistake involving e-mail (writers Robert Blaney and Gregory Small aren’t too specific about what he did that was so terrible – possibly revealing confidential information, which was my guess – but he pleads with his bosses that “I tried to fix it,” whereupon they tell him that that only made it worse and he should have reported the mistake to them instead). Within several acts he’s not only following Chastity around, he’s getting in his face despite her taking out a restraining order against him, and he ultimately gets arrested and falls from his perch as an attorney to the depths of imprisonment. Naturally, being the creation of “inspirational” author Victoria Christopher Murray, Xavier’s fall from grace is anticipated by his admission, at a dinner date for Chastity and her friends, that he’s an agnostic while they all grew up in the church and still believe in God.

Meanwhile, Chastity meets up with her childhood sweetheart, Roger Thompkins (Romeo Miller, former rapper L’il Romeo, who in real life is 10 years younger than Michelle Williams). Roger makes his living teaching karate and running a dojo on the island they both grew up on, though the issue that broke them up is that he wanted to stay there and she wanted a career as a big-city lawyer. There’s a thinly veiled message here against interracial relationships that carried over into The Wrong High School Sweetheart as well: both stories are about successful, professional Black women who suffer when they get romantically and sexually involved with white males and get redeemed when they return to partnering with Black men. (One would never guess from these stories that the two most powerful and influential Black women in the country right now, Vice President Kamala Harris and newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, are both in long-term marriages to white men.) Needless to say, some of the karate moves Roger teaches Chastity come in handy when she has to defend herself against Xavier’s assault at the end! Directed by Troy Scott, Wrath is an O.K. Lifetime movie – despite the faith-based trappings it’s really a stalker story like the ones Lifetime has done hundreds of times before – and though it does have some hot soft-core porn scenes between Michelle Williams and Antonio Cupo (and a lot of nice topless scenes showing Cupo’s pecs), that’s not enough to redeem a strictly by-the-numbers Lifetime formula piece.

The Wrong High School Sweetheart (Hyvrid LLC, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next Lifetime movie was The Wrong High School Sweetheart, which apparently premiered last February on Lifetime’s “streaming” channel, LMN (for “Lifetime Movie Network”) and stars Mea Wilkerson as Danielle Taylor, up-and-coming Black realtor – or is that “Realtor (™)”? – who’s already living with a hunky Black guy named Todd (Doug Rogers) but is getting bored with him because he’s working such late hours he’s hardly ever home. Into this combustible mix comes a youngish white guy Danielle dated 10 years earlier while they were both still in high school, Danny Brooks (Alex Trumble), who was a star baseball player until he destroyed his arm during his freshman year in college, lost his athletic scholarship and has spent the last decade essentially living off remittances from his well-to-do parents who retired to Italy. Danny takes Dani (they used to do a running gag about the similarities of their first names, “Danny and Dani”) to Lincoln High School and leads her to all the spots on campus where they used to make out until the two kiss on the all-purpose room where their high-school prom was held – only on the Big Night Danny got thrown out of the prom for having some drinks outside with his male friends and Dani also got thrown out over guilt by association.

Danny is stuck living in the past, when he was still a sports hero, and I suspect writer Robert Dean Klein was, shall we say, “inspired” by the character of Brick in Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, another former sports hero in school whose athletic career was cut short by an injury and has never recovered, either physically or mentally, since. Dani makes the mistake of telling Todd that she kissed Danny – though she insists she didn’t go any farther with him than that – and Todd reacts like the usual jealous, possessive boor of a Lifetime husband whose wife has had, or seems to have had, extra-relational activity. He tells her he’s going to sleep on the couch until further notice. Todd also blows off Dani’s latest appointment with the couples counselor they’ve been seeing, Dr. Susan Lawrence (Tracy Nelson, who looks so much like Hillary Clinton she’d be excellent casting in a biopic of her). Danny shows up at Dr. Lawrence’s office posing as a potential therapist, and just as she’s outside her office leaving a voicemail on Dani’s phone mentioning that a nasty-seeming young man visited her office but she doesn’t say who, Danny runs her down with his car, killing her and leaving a recording of her murder, including her final groan, on Dani’s phone.

Later Danny also kills Jack (Ryan Shoos), an old friend and roommate from Danny’s college days, only before Danny got to Jack, Jack met with Dani and gave her the contact information for Amy (Jamie Bernadette), Danny’s old college girlfriend who had to deal with him coming back into her life, and when she finally threw him out Danny said ominously, “I’ve got another option” – meaning Dani. Eventually Danny kidnaps Todd and holds him somewhere on campus, and his price for letting Dani know where he is is to get that one last dance with her she didn’t get way back when – only the high-school principal, Dee Kressley (Vivica A. Fox, who is also an executive producer and keeps casting herself either as high-school principals or other authority figures that come in at the end and save the day for Our Rather Hapless Heroine), sneaks up behind Danny just as he’s about to kill Dani and either knocks him out or kills him, thereby saving Dani’s life. I briefly feared that writer Klein and veteran Lifetime director David DeCoteau were setting us up for a sequel in which Danny would reappear elsewhere and stalk some other victim with a connection to his past, but no-o-o-o-o,.they blessedly avoided that even though they also left Danny’s fate up in the air. My husband Charles came home from work midway through the movie and was struck by the presence of Eric Roberts in the cast as a good guy – usually of late he’s been playing the crazy stalker, but here he’s Detective Burns (no first name given) of the local police, who investigates Dr. Lawrence’s murder – but overall this movie is nothing special even though it’s a bit better than Wrath, and once again we have the anti-miscegenation message: Our Heroine’s dalliance with a white guy nearly does her in and she’s redeemed by the hunky Black boyfriend with whom she started at the beginning of the movie.

Dateline NBC: "The Real Thing about Pam" (NBC-TV, aired April 15, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched a two-hour Dateline NBC special called “The Real Thing about Pam” – the “Pam” in question being Pamela Hupp, whom NBC has been milking as a cash cow since 2014. That’s when Dateline did their first show about her, while Russ Faria was still in prison for murdering his wife Betsy, a terminally ill cancer patient who was stabbed over 50 times. At first Russ saw only the knife sticking out of her neck, presumed she’d committed suicide, and called that in to 911 – only when police recovered the body and found over 20 stab wounds all over it (there were actually more, but some of them weren’t discovered until a medical examiner did an autopsy), they immediately fastened on Russ Faria as a suspect and wouldn’t let go of him. In fact, prosecuting attorney Leah Askey (who’s now been married again and goes by the name of her second husband, Leah Cnaney) gave an interview to Dateline in which she said she is still convinced Russ Faria killed his wife even though he was exonerated in a retrial (a so-called “bench trial” before a judge, not a jury) and that Pam Hupp, the principal witness against him in his first trial even though neither Askey nor Russ’s incredibly dedicated defense attorney, Joel Schwartz (who was also interviewed for this show), called her as a witness in the retrial.

Eventually Pam Hupp’s story became the focus of five Dateline episodes between 2014 and 2019, the initial sequence of the Dateline podcast, and ultimately a six-episode mini-series (of which I saw episodes three through six) starring Renée Zellweger as Pam Hupp and Josh Duhamel as Joel Schwartz. (Those were the only two actors in the cast I’d heard of before, though to my mind the best performances were by Zellweger and Judy Greer as Askey.) The Real Thing about Pam focused on the bizarre ins and outs of the case against her and hit the main points of the case I had previously seen in the dramatization. These included claims that the photos taken of the crime scene after police detectives sprayed the area with Luminol, a chemical that reacts and lights up when it touches blood (it’s routinely used in police investigations today because it can be used to reveal blood even after someone tried to clean them up) were unavailable due to “a camera malfunction,” when in fact they turned up later and were leaked to Joel Schwartz. They revealed absolutely nothing – no trace of the blood that would have been there if Betsy Faria had been killed in Russ Faria’s home or on his clothes – though Leah Askey seriously suggested that the reason there wasn’t any evidence of blood on Russ’s clothes is because he had stripped naked before he killed her. She also rejected Russ’s alibi that he had been out at a weekly “game night” with four of hier (male) best friends by saying they had conspired with him to cover up the crime and lie that he had been elsewhere that night. Eventually Pam’s case unraveled after Askey lost her re-election bid to Mike Wood, who promised during his campaign that he would reopen the investigqation of Betsy Faria’s murder with Pam Hupp as his prime suspect. Between that and the Dateline NBC shows openly questioning Russ’s guilt and strongly suggesting that Pam killed her (four days after Betsy made over her life insurance policy to make Pam rather than Russ the beneficiary), and his ultimate exoneration in his retrial, Pam concocted a new scheme to make Russ appear guilty after all. This involved picking a random person off the street and posing as Dateline producer Kathy Singer to record a voice-over line for which Pam as “Kathy” would pay $1,000 in cash. (Keith Morrison, the real announcer for Dateline NBC who appeared in that role on the dramatization as well, assured viewers of both this wrap-up program and the mini-series that Dateline NBC never pays people for interviews or recorded voice-overs.) The first person she tried to recruit was a woman, Carol McAfee, who by sheer bizarre coincidence ended up meeting, falling in love with and ultimately being engaged to Russ Faria. (That sounds almost as preposterous as the revelation in the documentary included as a bonus item on the DVD release of the film The Conspirator, about the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, that his killer, John Wilkes Booth, had previously acted alongside his brothers Edwin and Junius Booth in a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. No producer getting a script about the Lincoln assassination would have included that scene – it would have been unbelievable that one of the most famous political assassins in history acted in a play about another of the most famous political assassinations in history – and yet it happened and we have a photographic postcard of all three Booth brothers promoting the play to prove it.)

The next person she picked was a young man named Louis Gumpenberger, who in 2005 – 12 years before Pam Hupp picked him for her scheme – had been in a car accident that had damaged his brain and slowed his physical movements to the point where he could barely get out the line Pam wanted him to say. The point was that she was going to make it look like Russ Faria had hired him to steal back the $150,000 in life insurance. Pam forged a note ostensibly from Russ to Gumpenberger making that claim, and she would kill Gumpenberger and claim self-defenswe. Only the police had no particular trouble figuring out that the “note” was actually written by Pam and Gumpenberger could not have threatened Pam in any way because he was physically incapable of running around her house and moving as quickly as she said he had. Eventually Pam took a so-called “Alford plea” of guilty to the Gumpenberger killing so she would get life imprisonment instead of the automatic death penalty that a first-degree murder conviction then carried in her state, Missouri, a bit of legal legerdemain that allowed Pam to claim innocence even while avoiding the trial and near-certain conviction and execution if she had gone to trial. It’s easy to see why the Dateline producers were so fascinated with Pam Hupp – and why their audiences have been equally fascinated for eight years now – because Pam is one of those people who is clearly sociopathic and yet she was able to present herself as “just plain folks” and affect a surface of normality that fooled everybody for years – and one can readily see why Renée Zellweger wanted to play her in the mini-series even though Zellweger, by comparison to the real Pam we see in police footage and other interviews on this show, way overdid the Southern accent and exaggerated the already larger-than-life actions and gestures of the real Pam Hupp.