The Guilty (Jack Wrather Productions, Monogram, 1947)

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

After watching Flowers in the Attic: The Origin: Part Two: The Mother (to use its unnecessarily cumbersome full title), my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post of one of the films noir Jach Wrather produced at Monogram Pictures in the late 1940’s, The Guilty. This was made just before the quite good High Tide, another Wrather/Monogram production we’d watched last weekend on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies, and like High Tide it was based on a script by Robert Presnell, Sr. and directed by John Reinhardt. Only this one started out as a short story called “He Looked Like Murder” by Cornell Woolrich, a popular pulp writer of noir fiction whose most famous story, “Rear Window,” was filmed chillingly by Alfred Hitchcock in 1954. Woolrich was a highly prolific author who probably published more than the other major noir writers of his time – Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler – put together, though his huge output came at a cost. He never seemed to care about going over his own work looking for and eliminating plot holes, and sometimes Woolrich’s stories have denouements that are preposterous on their face. This is especially true of a notorious story he wrote called “Fear in the Night,” in which a young man is hypnotized into committing an actual murder while believing he only dreamed the killing,a and he launches his own investigation once he learns that the man he dreamed he “killed” is in fact dead. (Fear in the Night was filmed twice, in 1947 and 1956, and in the earlier version DeForest Kelley, later Dr. McCoy on the original Star Trek, was the hapless hypnosis victim while in the remake, Nightmare, it was Kevin McCarthy from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)

Doubtless Jack Wrather intended The Guilty as a showcase for two talents who were near and dear to him: his wife (at the time), former child actress Bonita Granville, who got cast in the dual role of Estelle and Linda Mitchell; and Wrather’s good friend Don Castle, who got the plum role of returned Army veteran Mike Carr. (Castle got a “Presenting” credit in the opening roll.) This was a good time for women playing dual roles in which one character was good and one bad – the year before Bette Davis had made A Stolen Life and Olivia De Havilland had made The Dark Mirror – and as in those movies, the two Bonita Granvilles are diametrically opposed morally. Linda is the “good girl” in love with Mike’s fellow veteran Johnny Dixon (Wally Cassell), who served with him in the Battle of the Bulge, in which he was wounded and developed what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Johnny had briefly dated Estelle before deciding that Linda was the one he really wanted, and when Linda turns out to have been killed Johnny is the prime suspect. The usual dogged police officer, Detective Haller (Regis Toomey), shows up to investigate the crime. The Mitchell sisters lived at home with their mother (Netta Packer) and a family friend named Alex Tremholl (John LItel) who formed an unhealthy attraction towards Linda, and the cops eventually arrest Tremholl for the murder – only it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Mike Carr is actually the killer. He picked up with Estelle when his roommate Johnny abandoned her for Linda, only he got so tired of her extra-relational activities with other men he decided to kill her – but because the two sisters looked alike, he killed Linda by mistake.

For a while I thought that Jack Wrather and Monogram were going to go where Raymond Chandler and Paramount had feared to tread by making Johnny Dixon the killer, motivated by what combat had done ot his psyche. Raymond Chandler had written just that ending for his original script for The Blue Dahlia – the brain-damaged Buzz (William Bendix) would have turned out to be the murderer of Johnny Morrison’s (Alan Ladd) unfaithful ex-wife (Doris Dowling) – but when the U.S. Navy got wind that Chandler was writing a movie in which a brain-damaged sailor would turn out to be a killer due to injuries he’d suffered in combat, they served notice that they would never again cooperate with any Paramount production if the film went out with that ending, so Chandler was forced to come up with a totally synthetic and unbelievable replacement finish. Alas, Weather and Monogram didn’t have the guts to confront the U.S. government censors either!

The actual ending of The Guilty reminded me of the school of thought surrounding Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 film noir masterpiece Detour in which the central character (Tom Neal), who narrates the story, isn’t an innocent victim of fate who ends up with two corpses on his hands that he can’t prove he didn’t kill, but an actual murderer who’s been lying to us all along in his flashbacks. The Guilty has exactly the ending as that alternate reading of Detour, and I’m tempted to attribute it to Woolrich rather than Presnell because of the many out-of-left-field finishes that abound in Woolrich’s stories. One of the quirks of cinema is that while it’s considered O.K. for a character to tell a lie in dialogue, if the action is actually dramatized and we see it on film we’re supposed to believe it’s part of the story’s truth. Alfred Hitchcock famously broke that rule in the opening sequence of his 1950 film Stage Fright – in which Ricnard Todd’s character narrates a flashback that turns out to be a lie he invented to cover up a murder he’d committed – and other filmmakers had tried that before, but there’s still a sense of dirty pool about it. Most of The Guilty is narrated in flashback during scenes taking place at a bar owned by Tim McGinniss (Thomas E. Jackson, who usually played incorruptible cops) to which Mike and Estelle frequently went on their dates – and they’re shown in hot and heavy sexual poses that in retrospect made it seem unbelievable that he killed her sister, thinking it was her. I quite liked The Guilty for what it was, but it didn’t have the extraordinary depth of High Tide (whose author, Raoul Whitfield, was a far more socially conscious author than Woolrich), with its subplot of urban corruption – and High Tide did the same gimmick ending (the character we’ve been rooting for and told to admire all movie turns out to be a gangster himself, using his power as city editor of a local newspaper to eliminate his gangland competitors) but to much better effect than The Guilty.

Boston Legal, season one, eipisodes 3 and 4: "Catch and Release," "Change of Course" (David E. Kelley Productions, 20th Century-Fox Television, 2004)

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

Last night I screened the next two episodes from the first season of Boston Legal in sequence, “Catch and Release” and “Change of Course.” This time I was grateful for the little recaps given at the start of each episode that said, “Previously on … ,” which usually turn me off when I’m watching a show on the air (if you tell me I have to watch every episode of your show to make sense of them all, I’m much more likely not to want to watch the show at all) but which were welcome for the orientation they provided watching the series in fits and starts, as my husband Charles and I are doing. “Catch and Release” was primarily about a young attorney who is, at least as far as he knows, Donny Crane (Freddie Prinze, Jr.), son of hot-shot litigator and firm partner Denny Crane (William Shatner). He was the product of a one-night stand between his mother and Crane – at least that’s the story he’s been told – and Denny financed his education but barely met him and certainly didn’t try to be a dad to him in any emotional sense. They meet in court on opposite sides of an issue involving a mega-project a developer that’s one of the law firm’s clients wants to build in the middle of the city. It’s taken a year and a half for them to assemble the financing and got all the city and state permits they need – except one: the project would destroy a small river that is the home of a species of wild salmon.

Donny goes to court to protect the salmon habitat and fight the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to designate farmed salmon as part of the same species as wild salmon, which will allow them to remove salmon from the endangered species list and therefore allow the project to go forward. (This was odd watching in light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that pretty much gutted the EPA’s ability to do much of anything.) Aided by a tough, no-nonsense Black woman judge named Leslie Bishop (Patricia Belcher), Crane fils actually wins his case – only to discover by accident that he’s not Craine pere’s son after all: he’s the result of a trick her mom had with another man, but Crane, Sr. decided to help her out financially to raise her son. Charles thought the whole idea of Freddie Prinze, Jr. being William Shatner’s son was preposterous. He even downloaded a photo of Freddie Prinze, Sr. on his phone to show what the man’s dad actually looked like, and it was nothing like William Shatner. (Charles read the above and pointed out that I’m actually the one who usually gets freaked out by movies in which people who look nothing like each other are passed off as biological relations, but to me Freddie Prinze, Jr. didn’t look that different from William Shatner that it was inconceivable that the young “Captain Kirk” Shatner couldn’t have fathered him.)

There are the usual intersecting plot lines, including a sexual harassment case in which Alan Stone (James Spader, top-billed) has to face Christine Pauley (Elizabeth Mitchell) in court after Christine tried to run himi over in her car, was sent to a mental institution, and was just released after Alan agreed to be responsible for her, on the assumption that she was going to leave Boston and live with her parents in Chicago. Only she double-crossed him and regained her former attorney’s job in Boston, and now she’s representing a man being accused of sexual harassment by a woman former employee whose case Alan is handling for the firm. Christine wins a low-ball verdict essentially by portraying the sexual harassment laws as themselves sexist because they assume the weakness of women. There’s also a plot line in which Alan’s current girlfriend, Sally Heep (Lake Bell), has to try a case defending a thief who allegedly stole a purse from someone and listed her wallet – only she manages to win by distracting the jury with an anecdote after he claims he thought it was his wallet. The fourth episode, “Change of Course,” features Edwin Poole (Larry Miller), who showed up for work in the opening episode wearing a normal suit jacket and shirt above the waist but nothing below it (he did have a nice ass), escaping from the mental hospital he was sent to and taking the case of Warren Litch (Jeremiah Birkett), a Black man who’s already gone through seven court-appointed public defenders in his upcoming trial for murdering a Black police officer. It turns out Litch knows he’s guilty and is headed for a life sentence, and he’s trying to stretch out the case as long as possible before he’s convicted. It also turns out that the police extracted a confession from him in the hospital by telling him he was about to die and having the police detective pose as the hospital’s chaplain/ Given that they’re not sure Edwin is up to handling a trial, the law firm assigns Lori Colson (Monica Potter) to be co-counsel, while the judge has had it with Litch’s shenanigans and insists that he’s not granting any more delays in the trial.

Also featured in this episode is the firm’s unscrupulous tactics in winning an acquittal for a woman CEO who’s accused of stealing a $200 scarf from a high-end store. She’s a kleptomaniac and the firm is worried that if she’s convicted, even of this relatively minor charge, her board of directors will invoke the morals clause in her contract, they’ll fire her and the flrm will lose one of its biggest clients. The one witness against her is the store clerk, Miles Tibbet (Will Radford), and much to her disgust Sally is assigned to cruise him in a bar, go on a date with him, and extract enough negative information out of him the firm will be able to get him to recant his testimony. The stratagem works, but Sally is so disgusted by what her boyfriend Alan got her to do that she at least temporarily breaks up with him, and he tells her that she’s too morally pure to be a lawyer. For my mind, the best aspect of this show was the quite chilling performance by Jeremiah Birkett as Warren Litch; he’s so matter-of-fact about his criminality he becomes oddly appealing. I can see why Boston Legal was a success – it lasted five seasons and the previous David E. Kelley series it spun off from, The Practice, lasted eight – even though the earliest episodes made it look like a show about a combination law firm and bathhouse for straight people!

Dune (Legendary Entertainment, Villenueve Films, Warner Bros., 2021)

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

Last night at 9:20 my husband Charles and I watched Denis Villenueve’s 2021 film of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction classic Dune – or at least the first half of it, since the movie comes to an abrupt cliff-hanger ending when Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his girlfriend Chani (Zendaya) interfaces with and joins the band of Fremen headed by Stilgar (Jasvier Bardem). The Fremen (pronounced “Freh-men” in the film even though I had assumed the correct pronunciation was “Free-men”) are the native inhabitants of the planet Arrakis, colloquially named “Dune” because its surface is almost all sand. It has no water to speak of, and in order to go about outside on its surface humans have to wear “stillsuits,” which capture people’s moisture and sweat and recycle it into drinking water. Arrakis is important because of a hallucinogenic drug, called “spice” (actually in Herbert’s novels it has an alternate name, “melange”), whose importance is explained in a part of Herberrt’s Dune that did not make it into the film script by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth. It seems that the events of Dune take place a full eight millennia from now, and in the meantime humanity’s increasingly sophisticated computers staged a rebellion. It was eventually put down, and to make sure it didn’t happen again the human race created an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the form of a human mind.” Instead the authorities created a special group of people called Mentats who would do the jobs humanity had formerly assigned to computers, and individuals with the right aptitudes and skill sets were singled out for training in the discipline of being human computers. (One of the most powerful scenes in Dune is when hero Paul Atreides is told that he’s secretly been given Mentat training utterly without his knowledge.) The hard part of relying on human beings instead of computers for travel across long stretches of space is keeping the Mentats alive, well and alert during that time, and for that reason they are given spice, which has made it the most valuable commodity in the universe.

As Dune opens, the Emperor has taken away the spice franchise from the Harkonnen family and given it to Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and his family instead, which includes his mistress Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and their son Paul. (One of the things that particularly bothered me about Dune the novel when I read it half a century ago is this blithe assumption that humankind has continued to advance technologically but its class system and overall social structure has regressed to feudalism. That’s also a common conceit in many genre novels, especially ones perched on the cusp between science-fiction and fantasy the way Dune is.) There’s a hint in the film that’s somewhat more developed in the book that the Emperor did this deliberately to set up the House of Atreides for failure and get Duke Leto killed (which he is, thanks to a traitor in his entourage). Paul has already received warrior training from Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa, still a hot young man but a bit too grizzled here for the almost unearthly beauty he showed in Aquaman) and Gurney Haslleck (Josh Brolin). One aspect of the book that does make it into the film is the Bene Gesserit, a sort of women’s guild to which Lady Jessica belongs. It’s headed by the Reverend Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), who reminded me a lot of Celia Lobsky’s (Mrs. Peter Lorre) role as the Vulcan high priestess in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek. Lady Jessica insists that her son be given the Bene Gesserit training even though the order has never admitted a male before,and throughout the movie Paul is repeatedly warned not to take the Bene Gesserit’s claims that they are a totally benign organization that seriously.

The central conflicts of Dune – at least the first part – are the Atreides’ position on the planet, the way the departing Harkonnens sabotaged as much as they could of the equipment needed to bring in the all-important spice harvest, and the morally ambiguous role of the Fremen, who are depicted very much like Native Americans. It’s my understanding that Frahk Herbert himself was either all or part Native American – after the first two books in the Dune cycle he wrote a 1972 novel called Soul Catcher, his first work outside the science-fiction genre, about Native Americans. (Judging from the Wikipedia summary of Soul Catcher, it seems like the plot of John Ford’s 1956 Western The Searchers told from the Native point of view.) The metaphor between real Native Americans and the fictional “Fremen” of Dune came through far more strongly this time around than when i read the book 50 years ago. There is a good movie lurking around in the plot, characters and situations of Dune, but alas Denis Villenueve didn’t make it. (I haven’t seen the earlier version directed by David Lynch, though I remember a late-1990’s TV-movie adaptation my husband Charles and I watched.) Dune the movie is sunk by the same faults of Villenueve’s previous film, Blade Runner 2049, particularly a ponderousness that makes it seem like if he has his movie move along very slowly it will seem “profound.”

Dune is nowhere nearly as terrible as Blade Runner 2049, which struck me as worthy if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave an award for All-Time Worst Sequel to a Great Film. But it’s still pretty dreary, and even tha action scenes seem dull, everything bathed in desert fog and dankly lit so this movie literally becomes hard to watch after a while. Even the sudden last-minute appearance of one of the giant sandworms which live under Arrakis’s surface, terrorize the local population and (as explained in a part of the book Villenueve hasn’t reached yet) actually create that precious spice fails to terrify because Villenueve directs it so ponderously. I’ve seen three of Villenueve’s films so far and actually liked the first one, Arrival (in which Amy Adams gave a terrific performance as an earth scientist assigned to figure out how to communicate with recently landed extraterrestrials), though my generally good notice on my moviemagg blog post had some caveats, notably Villenueve’s apparent disinterest in linear plots and through-lines. “The conceit behind the story is that the aliens don’t think in linear patterns and have no conception of time as a one-way continuum of past-present-future,” I wrote. “O.K., but if they have no linear thought patterns, how did they build spaceships in the first place? Don’t you have to think in linear terms to be able to develop technology at all? And what’s even worse, the filmmakers use this conceit to set up a truly revolting surprise ending à la The Sixth Sense.” I actively hated Blade Runner 2049, and when I heard Deniks Villenueve was doing a remake of Dune, my comment was, “So that man is going to desecrate another classic science-fiction story?” And his imdb.com page has the depressing news that he’s going to do it a third time because his next announced film is an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvcous with Rama!

Thor: Love and Thunder (Marvel Studios, Fox Studios Australia, Walt Disney Pictures, 2022(

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

Last night I went with a group from Bears San Diego to see Thor: Love and Thunder, fourth in the sequence of Marvel comic-book movies based on their 1960’s adaptation of the legendary Norse god into a superhero character. The first Thor movie in the current cycle (before that there was a rather creepy and terrible one from an Italian producer in the early 1960’s called Thor and the Amazon Women) was made in 2011 as a co-production of Marvel Studios and Paramount. It starred drop-dead gorgeous Chris Hemsworth as Thor and it was directed by Kenneth Branagh, who brought the same over-the-top sensibility to it that he had to his Shakespearean adaptations of Henry V and Hamlet. The second movie, Thor: The Dark World was made two years later, after the Walt Disney Corporation (Walt Disney the person is dead, but Disney the company is seemingly immortal!) bought Marvel and thereby acquired the property. In the meantime Thor also appeared in the Avengers film cycle (none of which I’ve actually seen), and one of the Guardians of the Galaxy characters (also from a film cycle I’ve never seen, though I got the CD soundtrack of the second because it was a good compilation of 1980’s pop-rock), the Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), also makes a guest appearance in Thor: Love and Thunder. A post by Daniel Villareal on the Gay Web site Queerty.com (

https://www.queerty.com/4-moments-prove-thor-love-thunder-gayest-marvel-movie-yet-20220709?utm_source=Queerty+Subscribers&utm_campaign=aa222d7468-20220709_Queerty_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_221c27272a-aa222d7468-430235561

) gave me valuable infromation on what happened to Thor in both the Avengers films and the third installment of his self-named cycle, Thor: Ragnarok, which I haven’t seen.

As Villareal explained, “One of the film’s running gags is his weird relationship to his first hammer, the mythic lightning-striking Mjölnir. After Thor’s evil sister Hela (Cate Blanchett) breaks Mjölnir in the third Thor movie, Thor goes on to fashion a new ax-hammer hybrid named Stormbreaker in The Avengers: Infinity War. Thor begins Love and Thunder with Stormbreaker at his side. But when he sees his ex, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), wielding Mjölnir as the female incarnation of Mighty Thor, it becomes apparent that the god of lightning feels weird and jealous about it. As the film continues, he tests whether he can still summon the hammer from Foster’s grasp, and he talks to the hammer affectionately and secretively as if it’s a beloved former male companion.” In fact, director and co-writer Taika Waititi and his scripting collaborator, Jennifer Kaytan Robinson, did such a good job anthropomorphizing Thor’s two weapons they actually seem jealous of each other. The film opens with a bizarre sequence in which a bald, white-clad man is stranded on a desert island and he meets a group of humanoids who claim to be gods, only he quickly and easily vanquishes them. The sequence is quite clearly played to make it look like the white-clad man is a good guy and the “gods” a bunch of crreepily evil creatures, but the opposite is true: the white-clad bald guy with the facial scars is Gorr (Christian Bale), known as the “God-Butcher” because he wants to kill whatever gods he can find. In order to do this, he needs to find a magical weapon called the “Necrosword” that can kill any god, even ones who are otherwise immortal.

Thor also finds out that his former girlfriend Jane Foster is now in possession of his magic hammer Mjölnir and wears a costume that makes her look like a female version of himself – and when she’s not doing that, she’s a physics professor and a best-selling author of books about science. Alas, she’s also been diagnosed with stage IV cancer, the terminal kind. The plot has Gorr kidnap several children of so-called “New Asgard,” which among other clevernesses in the Waititi-Robinson script is actually a Norse-myth theme park, and Thor and his team, including a woman named King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) – and no, it’s never explained why she’s called “King” instead of “Queen” – and a rock person named Korg (played by director Waititi), commandeer a flying boat drawn by rams (well, they had to get something from the original myths right!) to rescue the kids from the Shadow Kingdom where Gorr has taken them. They travel to a community called “Omnipotence City” in which gods from various mythologies live together in a community presided over by Zeus (Russell Crowe), but Zeus doesn’t want anything to do with them and refuses their request for help. There’s a big fight in which Korg’s body crumbles into a pile of boulders, though his head remains alive and continues to talk, and Thor manages to steal Zeus’s magical thunderbolt and impale him with it, thereby at least temporarily killing him. In yet another clever touch in a movie that abounds in them, when Thor and his team enter the Shadow Kingdom the film becomes black-and-white, and though it regains flashes of color periodically as the good guys briefly get the upper hand over Gorr, it doesn’t return to full color until they have vanquished the Shadow Kingdom and rescued the kids. Gorr unexpectedly becomes a figure of pathos as he dies, and Thor loses Jane Foster definitively but ends up as foster-father to Gorr’s young daughter.

I don’t think Thor: Love and Thunder is the greatest Marvel movie of all time (Black Panther takes that honor, hands down; as I’ve said before, Black Panther transcends all other comic-book superhero movies the way Citizen Kane transcended all the other movies Hollywood was then making about newspapers), but it’s well above average. Despite the usual ponderous action scenes that are the whole point of a movie like this, Waititi and Robinson deserve credit for making the film at least intermittently campy and fun. Though they hardly take the humor to the extremes of the 1960’s Batman TV series and movie, they never forget the fundamental silliness of the superhero movie as a genre and make light of it instead of taking it all too seriously. (Black Panther didn’t have laughs, but it was a serious drama disguised as a comic-book movie and it dealt with important themes instead of just cheap thrills – or not-so-cheap thrills, given how much it costs to do all that CGI.) The music for Thor: Love and Thunder is by Michael Giacchino (whom I’ve heard of before) and Nami Melumad (whom I haven’t), and while it’s hardly at Wagner’s level it’s serviceable and works well for the film.,

There’s also an odd in-joke in which Astrid (Keiron L. Dyer), the child of Heimdll (Idris Elba), the guard of Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge connecting Asgard to Earth who was killed in the 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War by Thanos, the lead super-villain of the Avengers series. But they insist on being called not “Astrid” but “Axel,” saying they got the name from Guns N’ Roses front-man W. Axl Rose (four of whose songs – “Sweet Child O’Mine,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Paradise City” and “November Rain” – are heard in the film) and leading Daniel Villareal to suggest that Axel might be female-to-male Transgender: “While there’s nothing else in the film [besides their insistence on using a masculine instead of a feminine name] to suggest that Axel is Transgender, it’s still a notable moment seeing as Astrid is commonly a girl’s name,” Villareal concedes. “Perhaps Heimdall mistakenly thought his child would be a girl, or maybe Axel was assigned female at birth. We may never know, but the child actor who plays Axel, Kieron L. Dyer, does a great job playing the self-respecting young hero regardless.” Chris Hemsworth is still quite attractive, but 11 years have passed since the first Thor and he had to bulk up every time he’s played the role – and the years are starting to show. He does get a nude scene in Omnipotence City, but this being an American movie his dick is blurred out (though we get the impression from the way the women in Zeus’s entourage react to it that he’s well-hung). Overall, I quite liked Thor: Love and Thunder and I especially enjoyed the light touch Waititi and Robinson brought to it instead of the gloomy seriousness all too many recent superhero films have been saddled with lately (that means you, X-Men franchise!).

Boomerang! (20th Century-Fox, 1947)

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

When I got home last night from the showing of Thoir: Love and Thunder my husband Charles and I watched a quite good movie on Turner Classic Movies called Boomerang!, made in 1047 by producer Louis de Rochemont for 20th Century-Fox/ De Rochemont had been the founder of The March of Time newsreel in 1935, and while fans of the British documentary movement ridiculed it as slovenly edited, overly reliant on staged re-creations with actors, and either blessed or cursed (your choice) by the God-like voice of Westbrook Van Voorhis as the narrator, ht was a highly popular series and largely crowded out other newsreels from theatre screens. In 1945, a decade after launching The March of Time, de Rochemont cut a deal with 20th Century-Fox to make narrative features that would not only be based on true stories but be shot as much as possible on the actual locations where the real events took place. One of the people who liked the idea of shooting on real locations was the film’s director, the young Elia Kazan, who had just finished making The Sea of Grass with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn at MGM and had been appalled that he was expected to shoot an intense drama about the open range inside an MGM soundstage on a carefully carpeted floor made to look vaguely like a wheatfield. Boomerang! was Kazan’s third feature credit (he had made his debut in 1945 with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) and he loved getting the chance to do it on the real locations, though he wasn’t as fond of the old-school Hollywood actors, Dana Andrews and Jane Wyatt, he was given as his leads. Kazan was much more comfortable with actors he’d worked with on stage, including Lee J. Cobb as the police chief of the small (and unnamed) Connecticut town where it takes place.

The gimmick is that after years of misgovernment by a corrupt political machine, the voters of the town rose up and elected a reform government that included a new city council, police chief Harold R. Robinson (Lee J. Cobb) and public prosecutor Henry L. Harvey (Dana Andrews). The new reform government gets to work on major public projects, including a children’s recreation center to be ron by Harvey’s wife Madge (Jane Wyatt), when suddenly their agenda is derailed by the murder of a popular old Episcopal priest, Father George Lambert (wyrley Birch). With seven alleged eyewitnesses to the crime, none of whom agree on much other than that the killer was wearing a dark coat and a light fedora hat, the police are clueless for at least two weeks and they’re getting ragged on by the local newspaper, the Record. The Record’s publisher, T. M. Wade (Taylor Holmes), was a strong supporter of the former city government and seizes on the Lambert murder as a way to make the “reform” government look incompetent so voters will turn against it and put Wade and his crooked friends back in power. We get a cloe as to Lambert’s real murderer when we show him confronting a middle-aged man and telling him point-blank that his sins,whatever they are, are endangering other people. Lambert says he’s going to insist that the man enter a sanitarium, and when Lambert also tells the man that he’ll have to let his wife know, the man goes ballistic.

This was obviously a piece of fiction added to the story by the screenwriter- Richard Murphy, since according to the narration (and presumably the original Reader’s Digest articles by Fulton Oursler – whose book The Greatest Story Ever Told was the basis for that notoriously ponderous biopic of Jesus Christ starring Max von Sydow and directed by George Stevens – on which Boomerang! was based) Lambert’s real killer was never found and the case remained open and unsolved. (We get a brief shot of a newspaper clipping announcing the death of this man in an accident, which reinforced my conclusion that the man’s terrible secret was he was an alcoholic and got into accidents while driving drunk.) Eventually the police send out a composite sketch of the suspect based on the accounts of the seven eyewitnesses, and from that they finally get a suspect: John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy), a World War II veteran who’s been leading a marginal life ever since he returned from combat. With seven eyewitnesses, a ballistics test that matches Waldron’s gun to the bullet that killed Father Lambert, and even a confession extracted from Waldron during a police interrogation in which they browbeat him for two days straight, not letting him sleep, it seems like an open-and-shut case. But D. A. Harvey becomes convinced that Waldron was actually innocent, and he shocks the town by declaring on the first day of Waldron’s preliminary hearing that he’s going to ask the judge to drop the case.

Later he partially backs off after a member of the reform party, Paul Harris (Ed Begley), threatens him, first by pulling a gun on him, then by announcing that he’s the sole owner of the Sunset Realty Company on whose land the recreation center was supposed to be built, and telling Harvey that if the reformers lose power in the next election, the machine will cancel the rec-center project and Harris will be ruined financially. But Harvey asks the judge for permission to call witnesses at the preliminary hearing, including Irene Nelson (Cara Williams), who had an affair with Waldron that ended badly when he abruptly left town and is willing to lie against him to get him executed. Harvey carefully deconstructs the case against Waldron. He gets his own ballistics experts to re-examine the gun and prove it could not have fired the bullet that killed Father Lambert, and in a dramatic display he has his assistant shoot the gun at him from the position behind Father Lambert’s neck the autopsy documented was where the gun was fired. When the gun fails to fire, Harvey announces to the judge that its firing pin was broken and therefore the gun couldn’t have gone off in that position. An imdb.com “Trivia” post notes that the actual case took place in 1924 and “Harvey” was actually Homer Cummings, who was later appointed U.S. Attorney General during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration – and Cummings was still alive when the film was made and endorsed the film as accurate. Elia Kazan didn’t like the narration the film was saddled with, nor did he care for Dana Andrews as an actor – though one day Andrews showed up for work with a hangover just as Kazan was about to shoot his climactic courtroom scene. The scene had been rewritten overnight and Kazan was understandably worried that Andrews couldn’t learn the new dialogue in time. “Just give me 20 minutes,” Andrews told Kazan, and 20 minutes later he emerged from his dressing room to shoot the scene – and was line-perfect.

Nightmare PTA Moms (Almost Never Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Yesterday at 8 p.m. I put on a couple of movies on Lifetime, including one very much to their usual formulae called Nightmare PTA Moms (now why do I get the impression Lifetime’s writers sit around and brainstorm, “Just what’s the absolutely silliest title for a Lifetime movie we can dream up?”) and then the first part of a five-part, 10-hour miniseries called Flowers in the Attic: The Origin. Nightmare PTA Moms, both written and directed by men (Dave Thomas was the director and Adam Balsam the writer), hews pretty close to the usual Lifetime formula, though it has at least one slight deviation: to play Rick Gardner, the innocent young husband and father, casting director Ricki Maslar got an unusually hunky guy, Jonathan Stoddard. Not only do we get a lot of yummy shots of him topless and showing off a great pair of pecs, Stoddard is so sexy he’s the kind of guy Lifetime usually casts as a villain. As the film begins Rick has uprooted his family, wife Gail (Brianna Cohen) and middle school-age daughter Chloe (Madison Paige), to take a promotion in his job for Jackie Z, a fashion retailer that seems to specialize in middle-end clothes, not too fancy but not totally plain, either. Instead of just running one Jackie Z store, Rick will be regional manager and responsible for at least 12 outlets. Rick is excited at the new job and the extra money he’ll be making, even though Gail is unhappy because she’s built up a catering business, Gail’s Goodies, and she’ll have to start from scratch in a new town, Clearwater, Florida. (The locale isn’t identified until well into the movie, but from the stock shots of causeways we get in the opening I was already thinking Fl;orida.)

The film actually begins with a black-ahd-white prologue set five years before the main action (though Lifetime doesn’t give us their usual chyron to tell how much time has elapsed between the prologue and the main body of the film), in which a man goes down a flight of stairs in search of a malfunctioning electrical circuit and either falls or is pushed down a long flight of stairs in the dark. Only later do we learn that this man is financial adviser Bill Vanderberg, and his widow Vanessa (Alissa Filoramo) runs the local PTA (the initials stand for “Parent-Teacher Association” but there don’t seem to be any teachers involved) with all the sympathy and understanding of a Mob boss. Over the summer Vanessa lost her re-election bid for PTA president to a woman named Lexie Wilson, only just a week after the election (like Donald Trump, Vanessa refused to accept her loss and insisted on a ballot recount, which produced exactly the same vote as the first coult) Lexie apparently committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. Vanessa re-assumed the PTA presidency at the exclusive Bellhaven Academy and blackmailed the remaining PTA members to cover for her and lie to the police investigating Lexie’s death. Gail Gardner joins the local PTA, hoping for (among other things) networking opportunities to build up her catering business, and immediately runs afoul of Vanessa’s iron control.

When Vanessa’s daughter Serena (Gracie Silva) falls behind in soliciting contributions for the PTA’s walkathon, she pressures a Black woman on the PTA whose husband gave only $10 to give more so Serena will be on top again. Later she goes ballistic when at the PTA’s annual Hallowe’en costume party, Vanessa’s sorceress costume loses the top prize to Gail Gardner’s outfit as Marie Antoinette (with Rick in the audience, dressed as Louis XVI, cheering her on). While she’s at the party she gets word from an Asian-American PTA member named Sunny (Hana Liu) who tells her that Vanessa definitely murdered her husband (though since Vanessa and Bill were alone in the house when she killed him, one wonders how she would know) and blackmailed Sunny into giving her a false alibi. She was able to do this because Sunny had been the treasurer of the PTA when Vanessa was president, and Vanessa threatened to lie and accuse her of embezzling the group’s funds. According to Sunny, Vanessa’s motive for murdering Bill was jealousy: she was convinced he was having an affair with Lexie Wilson and wanted to put a stop to it even if it meant making herself a widow (which status she of course uses for maximum social sympathy). Vanessa has also decided to seduce Rick, and to that end she shows up at Jackie Z to buy a very sexy-looking skin-tight black-and-white yoga outfit and asks Rick to help her in the fitting room. Rick is already under suspicion from Gail because he earlier carried on an online flirtation with a woman, though it stopped short of even a face-to-face meeting, much less anything down-’n’-dirty. Gail is convinced that Rick’s 25-year-old assistant Sissy (Hedy Nasser) has the hots for him – which is believable judging from what we see of the body language between them – and once Gail learns that Rick left his phone in the dressing room while helping Vanessa, she’s immediately convinced that the two of them are, if not yet having an affair, at least on their way to one.

Gail goes to Jackie Z and buys the same spectacular yoga outfit Vanessa did (and it looks equally hot on both of them), and she happens to be wearing it when, after a call ostensibly from a Bellhaven alumni association but actually from Vanessa – who in the meantime has also launched a campaign to sabotage Gail’s business by posting negative reviews online and spiking her cookies with a mild food poison, not enough to kill but enough to make six people sick. Thinking it’s going to be her last chance at a big order before Vanessa’s sabotage wrecks her reputation. Gail frantically cranks up her oven and produces several boxes worth of cookies and cupcakes, only of course it’s a trap and Vanessa and Gail end up on the balcony at Bellhaven. Gail’s husband Rick shows up and gets into the school absurdly easily given that we’ve been led to believe it’s after hours and all the entrances have been locked, but in the end it’s Gail herself who pushes Vanessa off the balcony rail. Just when we’ve thought Vanessa is dead, we get a typical Lifetime chyron, “Three Months Later,” and three months later Gail chairs the election meeting of the PTA, which elects Sunny the new president – while Vanessa is in prison, alive but injured from the fall, where she gets a visit from her daughter Serena, asks how Serena’s grandmother is treating her, and boasts that she’s just been elected chair of her cell-block’s inmates’ association. (Do they have such things in Florida prisons? Just asking.) Nightmare PTA Moms – a bit of a misnomer because there’s only one true “nightmare PTA mom” in the dramatis personae – is actually a fun romp through the usual Lifetime clichés, and it benefits from a full-bodied bitch performance from Alissa Filorama as Vanessa. It’s true the role is simply a stock Lifetime villainess without the dimension Christine Conradt might have given her if she’d been writing this, but Filorama plays the part with a kind of spunky intensity – and though Jonathan Stoddard is no great shakes as an actor, he’s fun enough to look at it doesn’t really matter if he can act!

Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, part 1:The Marriage (A&E Studios, Lifetime, 2o22_

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

Alas, the next Lifetime movie on the channel last night, Flowers in the Attic: The Origin: Part 1: The Marriage, was a piece of overblown garbage that makes one wonder why they bothered. It was based on a novel called Garden of Shadows, attributed to “V. C. Andrews,” a hack writer of romantic fiction with Gothic twists who died in 1986, one year before Garden of Shadows was published. No matter: deciding that the name “V. C. Andrews” was too valuable a property to be allowed to die with its original owner, her publishers simply hired another writer, Andrew Neiderman, to keep cranking out “V. C. Andrews” novels, some of them based on outlines she’d left behind, some (especially later on, after he ran out of Andrews’ own material) his own inventions in her style. Garden of Shadows was the fifth and last book in the Flowers in the Attic cycle, in which a crazy old woman named Olivia Foxworth (played in Lifetime’s earlier adaptation of Flowers in the Attic by Ellen Burstyn, in one of those performances in which an old pro seems to be pushing aside the younger actors and saying, “Here, let me show you how it’s done”) locks her grandson and granddaughter in the attic of her old, crumbling Southern mansion in Charlottesville, Virginia. The two reach sexual maturity and become incestuous lovers simply because they’re both horny and there ls literally no one else. (I'm tempted to argue that among stories of brother-sister incest, at the top is Wagner's Die Walküreand at the bottom is Flowers inth8e Attic.)

Flowers in the Attic kicked off a string of three other sequels plus a prequel, Garden of Shadows, which was supposed to show how Olivia got so crazy she would do such a thing. In this version, set between 1918 and 1920 (we know that because the end of World War I and the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the vote happen during the show). Olivia Winfield (Jemima Rooper – a white girl named Jemima?) works in an office as a business assistant to her father. He’s determined to find her a husband, while she is reluctant until she meets Malcolm Foxworth (Buck Braithwaite), eligible bachelor from a super-rich family in Charlottesville, Virginia. Though she wonders what the darkly handsome bachelor could see in her – her idea of love and marriage has come from reading books like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, and she hopes Malcolm will be her real-life Darcy or Rochester – they ultimately marry. Only it turns out that Malcolm is almost literally a monster: he’s constantly tearing off on mysterious “business” trips, and when he finally has sex with his new wife, instead of giving her any sort of thrill he merely rapes her. They conceive two children in this manner, both boys – much to Malcolm’s disgust because he really wants a girl whom he wants to name Corinne, after his mother, who abandoned the family when Malcolm was five and didn’t return to his life until years later, just before she died.

Malcolm’s long-lost father Garland (Kelsey Grammer, of all people) shows up with a young bride named Alicia who's about Olivia’s age, and the two of them have another child – also a son instead of a daughter. Malcolm, bound and determined to father a girl, rapes his stepmother Alicia, and when his dad catches him in the act, Malcolm strangles and kills him. Malcolm justifies this by saying that Olivia failed in her duty to give him a daughter – she was told by Dr. Curtis (Peter Bramhill) after the birth of her second son that she could not bear any more children – and therefore this gives him the “right” to force h himself on any available woman. There are at least two servants in the Foxworth household, a white battle-axe whose family has been there for generations and who makes Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (a tale this one owes quite a lot to, as it does to The Heiress and the British 19th century classics it name-checks) seem warm and fuzzy by comparison; and Nelly, a Black woman whom Olivia makes her confidante until Malcolm decides they’ve gotten too close and fires her. In the final scene Olivia agrees to keep quiet about Malcolm murdering his dad, in exchange for several conditions: she demands that Malcolm set up a $2 million trust fund for both their sons; that Alicia be allowed to stay in the house until her second baby is born, whereupon Malcolm and Olivia will raise it as their own; and that Nelly be rehired – despite the reluctance of Nelly’s mother Celia (Evelyn Miller) to let her go back to Foxworth Hall. (Nelly and Celia essentially become the Lifetime stereotypes: the voice-of-reason Black characters who try to talk the white people in the story out of doing the stupid, obnoxious or evil things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all.)

Amazingly, Lifetime is doing Flowers in the Attic: The Origin as a five-part miniseries, which means there’ll be four more two-hour movies on this theme to suffer through running every Saturday night until the cycle ends. It reminds me of the way Peter Jackson and his writers squeezed three movies out of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit – not at all a long book – to create a cycle that would match the earlier one he made from the three books in The Lord of the Rings, each of which is at least twice as long as The Hobbit. I remember when Charles and I got the boxed set of all six of Jackson’s Tolkien movies I more or less suffered through the three Hobbit films – they seemed relentlessly overblown and inflated (but then this is the man who expanded the Beatles’ Let It Be from 90 minutes to six hours, and also made a 190-minute remake of King Kong when the 1933 original was near-perfect at 100 minutes).

I’m not sure whether I’m going to keep watching the rest of the installments of Flowers in the Attic: The Origin; I liked bits and pieces of this first episode but for the most part it was pretty much an endurance test, with the characters speaking ultra-stilted dialogue that was the screenwriters’ attempt to make this sound like it was taking place at the start of the 1920’s, and the cinematographers making it look like they were shooting it through Vaseline to give a similarly “distant” gauzy air of the past. It also doesn’t help that, though Jemima Rooper is appealingly spunky (but then she never convinces us that a woman this feisty and independent would want to get married, especially to such a creep), Buck Braithwaite as the villain is simply a drip. I had thought while watching Alissa Filoramo in Nightmare PTA Moms that she was going through the motions of playing a Lifetime villainess, but compared to Braithwaite she was electrifying. Whether he’s being superficially charming or unleashing the beast within, Braithwaite is simply boring: he’s dull and has no charm whatsoever, and one doesn’t have to go back to Laurence Olivier, Colin Clive or Orson Welles as the characters Olivia name-checks to see what could be done with a character like this. One only has to go back to any number of previous Lifetime dramas which featured far more magnetic and intense performances by actors playing villains than this!