Live at the Belly Up: Tab Benoit (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the movie The Wife (2017), my husband Charles and I watched a quite exciting Live at the Belly Up episode featuring singer-guitarist Tab Benoit, born in Houma, Louisiana to Cajun parenmts in 1967. He made his first album in 1993 and has been recording ever since, even though the list of his albums on Wikipedia stops in 2012 and only the text of the page mentions the album he released in 2020 (also the copyright date on this show, though I suspect that like a lot of the other “2020” episodes of Live at the Belly Up, it was filmed in 2019 pre-pandemic and just not put through post-production until 2020), The New World Blues. Benoit played the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach with just a trio – himself on vocals and electric guitar, plus a hwavy-set electric bass player and an electrifying Black drummer. On his first song, “Why Are People Like That?,” he sounded and looked like he was doing early rockabilly,bot later on he settled into a swamp groove – though he’s a mot more assertive and less laid-back than a lot of artists who get tagged with the term “swamp rock” – with songs like “We Make a Good Gumbo” which draws onb his bayou roots. (Incidentally he pronpounces the word “bayou” as “bye-you,” not the “bye-oh” pronunciation I’d long thought authentic for Louisianans.) Benoit has been winning awards since 2007, when he won his first “B. B. King Entertainer of the Year” honor at the Blues Music Awards. He won that one a second time in 2012,and also won Best Contemporary Blues Male Artist and Best Contemporary Blues Album for Medicine (2011), whose title song was his set closer at the Belly Up. Benoit won Best Contemporary Blues Male Artist for the second year in a row in 2013, and he was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2010.

I’m amazed that I’ve never herd of him before, and I'm even more amazed at his virtuoso guitar playing. His Live at the Belly Up show featured only seven songs (“Why Are People Like That?,” “Whole Lotta Soul,” “Nothing Takes the Place of You,” “We Make a Good Gumbo,” “Dirty Dishes” – an interesting variation on the who’s-been-sleeping-in-my-bed sub-genre of blues songs, in this case “Who’s been eating in my kitchen?” – “Sac-a-Lait Fishing” and “Medicine”), and the main reason he played so few selections was the long, extended guitar jams he played on every one. I loved his virtuoso playing – it’s the sort of guitar I used to fantasize playing when I was in high school in the 1960’s (the age of guitar gods like Hendrix, Clapton, Zappa, Page and the recently deceased Jeff Beck) – and I also love the actual guitar he played. Wikipedia identifies it as “a stock 1972 Fender Telecaster Thinline electric guitar,” and it looks so worn, I wondered, "Did his grandfather buy it at Buddy Holly’s estate sale?” This was one of the best Live at the Belly Up shows I’ve seen in quite a while – though Samantha Fish’s and the band Joseph’s were right up there – and for sheer infectious drive it’s hard to beat Tab Benoit’s Blitzkrieg playing. Incidentally Benoit claimed in one of his interstitial intervlews that he originally worked as an airplane pilot by day and a musician by night, but “eventually my night job was paying me so much better than my day job, I decided to stick to it.”

Gypsy Wildcat (Universal, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. I ran my husband Charles and I a movie: Gypsy Wildcat (Universal, 1945), the fifth and next-to-last of the Technicolor extravaganaze starring Maria Montez and Jon Hall in the mid-1940’s. To this pointing he series they had cast Montez as either an Arab (in the first one, Arabian Nights, 1942; and the third, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, 1943) or a Polynesian (in White Savage, 1943, and Cobra Woman, 1944),so for thisa one the “suits” at Universal decided it was time for a change of pace and cast her as a Gypsy. Charles objected to the use of the term “Gypsy,” saying that for actual Rom people it’s now considered almost as much of a racial slur as Blacks consider the “N”-word, but if y ou’re looking for racial sensitivity about the last place you should expect to find it is in a 1940’s Hollywood movie, especially one made at Universal, which for some reason had a reputation as themost racist studio in Hollywood. (One 1940’s Hollywood film that seems surprisingly modern in its racial sensibilities is the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur masterpiece I Walked with a Zombie, with its surprisingly sensitive treatment of voodoo and the strong suggestion that even though slavery has been abolished for over a century, the Rand family is still living o a fortune built on slave labor and it has corrupted them.)

Gypsy Wildcat has some fascinating credits both in front of and behind the cameras; James M. Cain is one of the credited screenwriters (though this story is far from the noir novels that made his reputation), along with James Hogan, Ralph Stock and Gene Lewis. (Hogan and Stock are credited with the “original” story and Hogan, Lewis and Cain – in that order – with the screenplay, and I suspect Hogan would also have directed if he hadn’t died suddenly just before Gypsy Wildcat wtnt into production.) The director is Roy William Neill, who made all but the first of Universal’s 12 Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, and that probably accounts for Bruce’s odd casting here as a “High Sheriff” in the pay of the film’s principal villain, Baron Tovar (Douglass Dumbrille). The film kicks off with a scene at a Gypsy carnival put on by a band whose leader, Anube (Leo Carrillo), opens the movie with a spiel insisting that all the attractions at the carnival will be free. Naturally that arouses our suspicions immediately; we know from previous experience with Hollywood’s stereotypes about Gypsies that there will be a lot of highly creative means to separate the attendees from their money.

Into the Gypsy camp rides Michael (Jon Hall), waving an arrow he’s just pulled out of a dead man’s back. The dead man is Count Otto, and he was the local authority until he was killed by Baron Tovar,who sought to displace him and take over. He’s determined to frame the Gypsies for his crime, and whent hey refuse to hand over the killer because they have no idea who that is, he orders them all arrested and taken to his castle. (For all the escapism of the Montez-Hall films, their bad guys often act like the Nazi occupiers in U.S. movies about World War II – or the real-life Nazis.) Into the mix comes Carla (Maria Montez), Anube’s adopted daughter and star dancer of the carnival.amd pof course one look at her and Michael is smitten on first sight. So, alas, is Baron Tovar, who determines to get her for himself. He’s even more determined to get her when he spots a locket she wears around her neck, and just when we’re thinking, “Oh, no, they’re not going to poull the gimmick of having her turn out to be a long-lost princess,” they have her turn out to be the daughter of a long-lost … well, countess, anyway. It turns out that she’;s the rightful heir to the Baron’s estate and the moment she says the word, he’ll be dispossessed and out of there. In the film’s kinkiest scene, Baron Tovar gets Carla to agree to marry him by tying Michael up and having knife throwers throw knives at him.

After promising beginning the film turns surprisingly dull, as the characters chase each other over the same familiar Southern Californa locations Republic used for their Westerns and serials. Some of those rock formations have been in so many movies you want to wave to them and say hello. The Wikipedia page on Gypsy Wildcat has some fascinating comments from both Maria Montez and James M. Cain. Montez said oif the film, "This one is more golden bantam. I'm tired of being a fairy-tale princess all the time. In every picture I have royal blood. I told the studio I wanted to do something else. I thought everything was fixed when they put me in Gypsy Wildcat. But do you know what happens at the end of that picture? I turn out to be a countess.” And Cain, who was brought in towards tne end of the writing process and said he simplified the script and won the praise of producer George Waggner, said the film "was the beginning of a new phase of my picture career. After that I was a professional at the business; after that, I did all right," even though he did not have many screen credits and his list on imdb.com includes only one film noir, Out of the Past (an uncredited rewrite job), even though Cain’s greatest reputation was as a noir fiction writer. Gypsy Wildcat was the sort of O.K. movie that could have been considerably better, and at the end Dumbrille has got his and Montez and Hall are ruling from the big castle (obviously a model Universal patched into the exteriors,while its interiors are recycled sets from Universal’s old horror films, including an antechamber recycled from The Mummy’s Hand, a big set they reused often),presumably as queen and prince consort.

Secrets of the Dead: "World War Speed" ((Hoigggard. Films, Mentom Barraclough Carey, PBS International, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night [January 18] at 10 KPBS showed a rerun of a 2019 episode of the series Secrets of the Dead called “World War Speed,” which discussed the use of methamphetamines during World War II on both sides: the Germans who were mounting Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) campaigns in the first year that allowed them to sweep over must of Europe, including France, and the Allies, particularly Britain and the U.S., who had to figure out how to stop them and ultimately reverse the tide of the war. The show was based on the research of a British World War II historian named James Holland, who’s written 30 books about various phases of the conflict and got interested in the use of drugs on both sides of the war when a German Heinkel bomber that had crashed in the fjords off the coast of Norway was recovered in 2012, 70 years after its last flight. The cold waters off the Norwegian coast did an excellent job preserving the contents, including the “survival packs” each crew member had available.Among the items the packs included were small arms, food packets and various stimulants, including chocolates laced with an unusually hight caffeine content and a form of amphetamine called “Pervitin.” Alas, by the time Holland got to see the material salvaged from this plane the Pervitin packets themselves had disintegrated – literally – from their exposure to room-temperature air after decades underwater, but fortunately the Norwegian salvage crew had photographed one of the packets.

Amphetamines had actually been invented before the war – Pervitin was an over-the-counter drug in Germany from its invention in 1938 and its Anglo-American counterpart, Benzedrine, was also an over-the-counter substance since it was first put on the market in 1935. (Judy Garland got hooked early on by her studio, MGM, which put her on the drug not, as is often assumed, to enable her to work a hectic schedule, but to keep her weight down. Twenty years later Elvis Presley would get hooked on the same drugs for the same reason.) Holland contacted Dr. Peter Steinkamp, a German physician and pharmacological historian, who was able to show him some surviving packets of Pervitin. Despite the official anti-drug stance of the Nazi government, Adolf Hitler actually seized on the idea of giving Pervitin and other amphetamines to his soldiers as a way of keeping them awake for long periods of time and also increasing their fearlessness and heightening their aggressiveness. Hither was widely believed to be on drugs himself (and it is known that he regularly took “Dr. Köster’s Anti-Gas Pills,” an anti-flatulence medication which contained sub-lethal amounts of cyanide) and his second-in-command, Hermann Göring, was addicted to heroin (though when he was held at Nuremberg for trial on war-crimes charges, he cleaned up. The rest of the Nuremberg defendants were happy to see Göring back to his old self in court, and though all the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death, Göring cheated the hangman by persuading a U.S. servicemember who was supposedly guarding him to sneak him a cyanide capsule so he could commit suicide and avoid the disgrace of being hanged.

During 1940 the soldiers in the German army, the Wehrmacht, were prescribed a total of 35 million doses of amphetamines, and both sides seized on them as a “miracle drug.” The Germans gave their soldiers and pilots doses of 10 milligrams each, the British Royal Air Force gave their airmen twice as much – 20 milligrans – and by 1944 the Germans were deploying miniature two-person submarines (mostly for espionage, though each mini-sub contained a single torpedo so it could be used as a weapon of war instead of just reconnaissance) in which the crew members were given 100-milligram doses – 10 times what their counterparts in the Wehrmacht were getting and five times what the RAF pilots were taking. Among the quirkier characters mentioned on the show were Dr. Glenn Whitfieid, who actually flew with the RAF on bombing missions inside Germany administering drugs to them as they flew and noting their reactions; and Hugh V. Wallace, pharmacological consultant to British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who took over command of the British forces in North Africa and figured out how to defeat his German opposite number, Erwin Rommel, and his notorious Afrika Korps. Drugs were a large part of the British successes against Rommel’s forces; apparently the hopped-up British tank crews (equipped with what were then the best tanks in the world, the U.S.-made Shermans) charged straight at sandbars that often concealed German anti-tank weapons because the drugs made them throw caution to the winds.

Holland and Dr. Jerry Pugh, oen of his medical consultants, got in a tank and showed just how vulnerable they were despite their massive size; not only were tank crews assaulted by the dust and fumes kicked up by the devices, they were sitting ducks for anti-tank artillery, particularly a German weapon that could either be aimed straight up as an anti-aircraft gun or forward as an anti-tank weapon. Holland and Pugh did a chilling experiment with crash-test dummies that showed how easily a tank crew could have been killed through a direct hit on their tank, particularly from shrapnel kicked up by the sheer force of the impact as the anti-tank shell hit them. The show, written and directed bu Steven Hoggard based on Holland’s researches, also covered the “before and after” history of amphetamines and profiled Dr. Edgar Jones, a British medical researcher immediately following World War I who was the first scientist to identify what was then called “shell shock” and is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The episode mentioned the way amphetamines were marketed legally in the 1950’s as weight-loss aids as well as mood enhancers, and mentioned Marilyn Monroe’s well-known addiction to them as well as President John F. Kennedy – though it’s possible Kennedy didn’t actually know he was using them. Kennedy was a patient of the notorious New York-based Dr. Max Jacobson, nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood,” who became (in)famous for giving his celebrity clients injections he said were vitamin B-12 but really contained speed. This Secrets of the Dead episode was fascinating, especially in its documentation of the extent to which governments of all stripes have sought to use pharmacology to their advantage, despite the ill effects it might have on the people taking these drugs, often either without their knowledge, without their consent (let’s face it, if you’re a soldier you’re used to taking orders no matter what) or both.

Burned by Love (Johnson Prudiction Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I turned on the Lifetime channel January 15 for a couple of movies, a “World Premiere” of something called Burned by Love and the “world premiere” from the previous night, How to Murder Your Husband: The Nancy Brophy Story. Burned by Love was so obscure imdb.com hadn’t put up a page for it (though they have now) and it was a bit frustrating and confusing not to have a cast list to refer to. I did recognizes the names of director Michelle Ouelett and writer Shawn Riopelle, both of whom have worked together on previous Lifetime movies. It opens with one of the greatest scenes Lifetime has ever done: a philandering husband named Roger shows up at his home with another woman in tow. Unbeknownst to him, his wife Ashley Morris (Shiva Negar) has planned a surprise party for his birthday. “Surprise!” she and her invited guests yell. Then Ashley gets predictably angry at her husband for having brought another woman home for extra-relational activities, and she takes the painting she had made for him as a birthday present ans storms out. Then we cut to a chyron reading, “One Year Later,” and one year later Ashley is living on her own, in a house she inherited from an aunt, when unbeknownst to her, her best friend, Tess Parks (Mikaela Dyke) signs her up for an online dating service because Tess thinks Ashley needs to overcome her distrust of men and start dating again.

Alas, the online dating service takes Ashley from the proverbial frying pan into the fire, as she meets and has a virtual affair with Marco Pastore (Dillon Casey), who’s not bad-looking but not especially drop-dead gorgeous either. They have long sessions video-conferencing, during one of which Ashley falls asleep with Marco’s imaginary presence still very much with her. Well before the second commercial break, it’s become readily apparent to us that Marco is scamming her, and so it turns out when he gives her a cock-and-bull story about being robbed just before she was supposed to fly out to the deserted island where he lives and spend a hot weekend with him in the flesh. He tells her his bank accounts have been frozen and he needs $8,000, which she wires him, Then, his mission accomplished, he purges all traces of his identity from the Web and she realizes she’s been taken for a small fortune she can ill afford to lose, especially since she’s already supposed to be paying Roger for the right to the business name they were using together and he’s threatened to cancel the deal if she doesn’t pay up immediately.

Ashley’s career and finances seem to be saved when restaurant owner Jacquelyn (Alexis Koetting) hires Ashley, on Tess’s insistence, to do a ceramic mural for her remodeling job. Ashley and Tess are having an evening together when Tess sees Marco’s profile on another dating site. Tess suggests they do a site of their own denouncing Marco as a con artist and warning women away from him. Suddenly Marco’s business is in ruins because the Internet is full of warnings about him, and naturally he blames Ashley and determines to ruin her life the way she ruined his. Marco sneaks into the restaurant and destroys the mural, then plants a bug in Ashley’s handbag so he can eavesdrop on her 24/7 and learn her secrets. After that he traces Ashley’s ex Roger (ya remember Ashley’s ex Roger?) and beats him up to get him to reveal all her secret turn-ons and sexual vices. Jacquelyn fires Ashley over the destroyed mural and AShley’s only confidant, besides Tess, is Grant (Drew Nelson), a contractor working on the remodel to whom Ashley is attracted. The two end up having a date together, sharing banana cream pie at a diner and then going back to Ashley’s place to have sex – only Marco is outside eavesdropping on them with a monocular so he can watch as well as listen (courtesy of the bug in her handbag) as they get it on.

While Ashley is briefly convinced that Roger was the one who destroyed her mural – until he convinces her otherwise – Marco then targets Tess, forcing her to shoot a video denouncing Ashley as a liar and then kidnapping her, holding her in a motel room and threatening to kill Tess if Ashley gets the police involved. Fortunately, Ashley has a secret weapon: she’s been getting messages from various women Marco scammed and she recruits them for a private dinner at Jacquelyn’s restaurant. Ostensibly Ashely is inviting Marco to this event to make a video retracting her previous statements denouncing him, but once Marco shows up he recognizes the women from his previous scam calls and freaks out. When he spots the cops there he grabs Ashley and holds a knife to her throat, threatening to kill her at once if the cops (who are there in force, led by a particularly dykey woman detective) intervene, but Grant shows up with Tess, whom he was able to trace because the night manager at the motel where Marco was holding her was one of Marco’s previous victims and lost her life savings to him. Marco abducts Ashley but the cops are able to trace her, run him down and arrest him, and in the tag scene Ashley and Tess are having a companionate evening with hot stud Grant in tow.

Burned by Love is an O.K. Lifetime movie even though after the spectacular opening scene it goes pretty much downhill from there, though the casting directors did a pretty good job with the male leads. Dillon Casey as Marco (or Nicholas Pochuk, his original name, which he reacts to much the way Transgender people do when called by their pre-transition identities, which they call their “dead names”) is nice-looking enough we can believe he gets away with his scams as long as he does (including an elderly woman named Dorothy whom he successfully makes online love to and disappoints when she realizes he was only interested in her money), while Dave Nelson is sufficiently hot and studly we can accept him as the guy Shawn Riopelle is setting up to be the “good guy” to redeem Ashley from her rotten luck with both Roger and Marco. Alas, Riopelle also filled their script (“their” because there’s no indication on imdb.com whether they are male or female) with so many frankly unbelievable plot devices – including giving Marco an almost supernatural ability to get into other people’s spaces, including Ashley’s home and Jaccquelyn’s restaurant (c’mon, Shawn, don’t people ever lock their doors in your world?) – that someone should have given them the note the central character of How to Murder Your Husband routinely gets from publishers and agents that her plots are too preposterous and frankly unbelievable to work.

How to Murder Your Husband (Front Street Pictures, Peace Out Productions, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lifetime’s second January 15 movie, How to Murder Your Husband, was a good deal better than Burned by Love but was still no great shakes, and hardly one of the diamonds in the rough this network has given us before. It starred two old pros, Cybill Shepherd and Steve Guttenberg, as the Brophys, an unhappily married couple in Portland, Oregon. Husband Daniel Brophy (Guttenberg) works teaching cooking classes at the Oregon Culinary Institute and wife Nancy Crampton Brophy (Shepherd) spends her days writing romance/mystery/suspense novels and leading a book club for her and other aspiring writers in this sub-genre. After 27 years of marriage they still have a quite active sex life, but things are not going well for them financially. The Brophys live in an old house which is beginning to deteriorate – even though the location is a prestigious one and they could conceivably get a lot of money if they sold, only the realtor they invite to come look at it tells them they’d have to clear out their back yard. They don’t want to do that because Daniel raises chickens and also grows mushrooms. Nancy’s brother Mark Crampton is dying of cancer, and Mark’s wife, Viet Namese-born Jennifer Crampton (Sandy Minh Abley), rightly suspects that the only reason Nancy is buttering up to them is she’s hoping to grab Mark’s fortune either before or just after he croaks. Nancy also has purchased $1.4 million in insurance on her husband, and there’s a chilling scene reminiscent of Double Indemnity (in fact, the whole movie is reminiscent of Double Indemnity) in which she browbeats Daniel into signing the application for the last policy. The Brophys’ financial straits are symbolized by the cold-water tap on their kitchen sink, which has to be closed with a pair of pliers because the handle has long since been lost.

Amazingly, Nancy has started a blog called “How to Murder YOur Husband,” and we hear voice-overs from her throughout the film supposedly from posts she’s put up on this blog detailing just how she intends to knock her old man off. How to Murder Your Husband is actually based on a true story – the real Nancy Brophy killed her husband Daniel in 2018, shooting him first from behind and then from in front at his place of employment because she’d been told by her insurance agent that she’d get an additional $100,000 if he died at his workplace. And when her brother Mark finally dies, Nancy shows up with a preposterous new will disinheriting his widow Jennifer and leaving all his fortune to Nancy – only the probate judge disallows it and instead accepts Mark’s first will, which left Jennifer his fortune. So Nancy is more determined than ever t turn her husband into cash, only just like the plots of her books,Nancy Brophy’s real-life murder plot turns out to be full of holes. Nancy blames Daniel’s murder on Viet Namese gangsters whom Jennifer supposedly hired to kill both Brophys so Jennifer would get to keep her husband’s fortune after all, but her cover story unravels quickly when the two detectives investigating the case show up at her home and take pictures of her van. They do that to match the side damage on it to what they saw in the surveillance videos they recovered from the crime scene. Also, in order to conceal the fact that she’d actually fired the murder weapon, Nancy (on the advice of her butch-woman gun dealer) had switched out the barrel of her Glock pistol – only she bought the replacement barrel on eBay and, though she deleted her account, it still survived in “the cloud.”

Eventually the rean Nancy Crampton Brophy was tried for her husband’s murder and given a life sentence, though she’s eligible for parole in 25 years – ironically the length of time her insurance agent had told her she’d have to wait to collect the full value of her husband’s life insurance policies if she’d let him die au naturel. Charles actually was disappointed that because it was a true story, writer-director Stephen Tolkin (one of the better Lifetime filmmakers and a specialist in true-crime stories about women criminals) was stuck with Nancy’s real-life guilt and couldn’t do the Seven Keys to Baldpate-style ending he had hoped for, in which Nancy’s husband would be very much alive and the whole story just the plot of Nancy’s latest novel. How to Murder Your Husband was entertaining but didn’t have the depth of some of Lifetime’s other true-crime movies, and the cast was acceptable. There’s a certain degree of old-school professionalism to Cybill Shepherd’s and Steve Guttenberg’s work here, even though it’s sad to watch them as they are now and think back on how not and sexy they were decades earlier – but then none of us are getting any younger, and that includes former movie stars!

Monsieur Beaucaire (Paramount, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon at 5 I put on Turner Classic Movies for a run of three films, two of them starring Bob Hope: Monsieur Beaucaire (1946) and Caught in the Draft (1941). Monsieur Beaucaire began life as a 1900 novel by Booth Tarkington, which was later turned into an operetta by French composer André Messager and had been filmed at least once before this, a 1924 silent version with Rudolph Valentino in the title role, a barber at the court of King Louis XV who’s mistaken for a nobleman who’s supposed to make a royal marriage with a princess of Spain. Just what possessed Paramount to green-light a movie with Bob Hope, of all people, remaking a Valentino role is uncertain, but Monsieur Beaucaire the remake is a very funny film even though it suffers from anachronistic references to rifles and guillotines, neither of which existed in Louis XV’s time. It also suffers from Paramount’s decision to film it in black-and-white; ordinarily I don’t find myself wishing that films from the classic era that could have been shot in color weren’t, but this time I did. I ached to see all those splendid costumes and splendiferous sets in color, and I didn’t get the chance – even though Sam Goldwyn had made Hope’s previous historical spectacular, The Princess and the Pirate (1944), in color.

Monsieur Beaucaire was adapted for Hope’s purposes by two of his usual coterie of writers, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, and directed by the ever-reliable George Marshall in the same year Paramount inexplicably gave him the directorial reins on Raymond Chandler’s one original screenplay that was actually produced, The Blue Dahlia. Marshall was a first-rate comedy director who was clueless about how to make a film noir – even a spoof; when Hope actually did spoof film noir in My Favorite Brunette (1947) they assigned Elliott Nugent to direct, and though he was no great shakes as a noir director either, he showed far more sympathy for the genre than Marshall had. In Monsieur Beaucaire Marshall is in his element even though it’s pretty much a one-joke movie: the hapless Hope is obliged to impersonate the Duc le Cnandre (Patric Knowles), who has been ordered by King Louis XV (Reginald Owen) to marry Princess Marie of Spain (Marjorie Reynolds, wise-cracking reporter in the last three Mr. Wong movies at Monogram and then leading lady to Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in the bog-budget Irving Berlin musical Holiday Inn).

Hope’s love interest in the film is Mimi (Joan Caulfield, who by coincidence was leading lady to Crosby and Astaire in their other co-starring vehicle, Blue Skies), a scullery maid recently given a promotion to chambermaid, which she hopes will allow her to seduce Louis XV and get him to ghve her a castle, or at least keep her in the style of his current mistress, Madame de Pompadour (Hillary Brooke). Midway through the film Louis exiles Beaucaire and Mimi to Spain, where Beaucaire hitches a ride with the Duc and is obliged to dress in the Duc’s clothes to foil an assassination plot by the villain of the piece, Don Francisco (Joseph Schildkraut). Don Francisco is trying to sabotage the royal marriage and thereby start a war between Spain and France, in the hope of usurping the Spanish throne in the resulting chaos. By authorial fiat (Frank’s and Panama’s,not Tarkington’s; in his novel Beaucaire is actually a nobleman in disguise), the Duc and Marie meet and fall in love even as both complain that they’re being forced to marry someone against their will, and someone who will probably turn out to be (as Anna Russell put it) “excessively unattractive.” In the end, of course, Don Francisco’s plot is foiled,the marriage takes place as scheduled, and Beaucaire is reunited with Mimi and the two of them head for the United States – or the United Colonies, as they were then – and Beaucaire ends up as barber to George Washington.

The final shot is of Beaucaire’s and Mimi’s first child, who is played by Bob Hope in a baby’s rocker built in giant size – most likely the work of uncredited gag writer Frank Tashlin, who’d made his reputation in the Warner Bros. cartoon department where he’d studied the Laurel and Hardy movies for inspiration. The scene is straight out of the 1930 Laurel and Hardy film Brats, in which the two had dual roles as fathers and baby sons, courtesy of giant-sized sets Hal Roach’s design crew built. I had originally turned this on hoping to see the Valentino version – that’s what TCM had announced on their schedule – but it was not to be. Still, the 1946 Monsieur Beaucaire was a very entertaining film even though it was pretty much just a normal Bob Hope comedy dressed up as a period piece. One thing that surprises me about this movie is how good Patric Knowles is; he got his start in films playing Errol Flynn’s younger brother in Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and then ended up under contract to Universal, where he got cast in a wide variety of roles from the harried movie director in Olsen and Johnson’s Crazy House (1943) to the mad scientist Dr. Mainwaring (Baron Fraknkenstein’s son-in-law) in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (also 1943, with Bela Lugosi as the Monster). Given more sensitive handling, Knowles could and should have become a major star. Also,there are enough songs (three) in Monsieur Beaucaire to qualify it as a musical, and the best one os Knowles’ spirited rendition of “A Coach and Four,” written (like the other two songs here) by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, It’s possible he had a voice double – though the singer sounds so much like Knowles’ speaking voice I’m almost certain it’s his own – and though he’s no Nelson Eddy he compares favorably to Don Ameche’s singing of “Voilà, Voilà, Voilà” in another spoof of a story set in old France, the 1939 version of The Three Musketeers with The Ritz Brothers – and “A Coach and Four” is a considerably better song.

Caught in the Draft (Paramount, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second film in TCM’s mini-tribute to Bob Hope yesterday afternoon was Caught in the Draft, a film inspired by the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress in early 1941. Various studios grabbed hold of the peacetime draft as a theme for comedy, but potentially the greatest film on the topic was the one that didn’t get made. In 1941 Buster Keaton realized that the entire cast of his 1930 World War I spoof Doughboys were still alive and living in Los Angeles, so he pitched MGM on reuniting them for a sequel to Doughboys using all the cast members as they hard naturally aged. Alas,the “suits” at MGM told him that they didn’t think there’d be an audience for a comedy about the peacetime draft, so they turned him down. Then Universal made Buck Privates with their newly singed comedy stars,Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and the resulting film became a huge hit and the highest grossing film of 1941. (That was quite an honor that this lowbrow comedy out-grossed Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, How Green Was My Valley and all the other enduring masterpieces of that year.) The success of Buck Privates encouraged other studios to green-light similar projects, including 209th Century-Fox’s Great Guns with Laurel and Hardy, and this Paramount film with Bob Hope.

Caught in the Draft has basically the same plot as Buck Privates and Great Guns; in all three, a stuck-up pampered rich brat (Lee Bowman in Buck Privates, Dick Nelson in Great Guns, and Hope here) ends up in the army, pleadas for special treatment, and finally learns his lesson and “mans up” in the service. Caught in the Draft has some interesting wrinkles to the basic formula added by screenwriters Harry Tugend and Wilkie Mahoney, including casting Hope as movie superstar Don Bolton, whom we’re told is equally capable in romantic dramas and action movies. He gets involved with the military when he falls in love with Antoinette “Toni’ Fairbanks (Dorothy Lamour), daughter of hard-nosed Col. Peter Fairbanks (Clarence Kolb), and hopes to marry her because at least at that time, married men were automatically exempted from the draft.

Later he learns that the cut-off date for draft registration is 31, not 40, so the 32-year-old Bolton tries to bail out of marrying Toni – only she sees through all his schemes. In a last-ditch attempt to gain her sympathy he agrees to enlist voluntarily – only he’s hired his personal assistant, Bert Sparks (Eddie Bracken), to pose as the recruiting sergeant (Edgar Dearing) when the real sergeant goes out to lunch. Don’s plan is that Bert will take his application and turn him down because of his incapacitating fear of loud noises – in the film’s opening scene he ruined a take of a waqr-mvoie sequence by fracking out at the sound of pistols – but Toni has seen through that one, too, and bribed the real sergeant not to take lunch that day. Not only does Don wind up in the army for real, so do Bart and Don’s manager, Steve Riggs (Lynne Overman, a marvelous dry-wit comic and close friend of James Cagney and Spencer Tracy, who went to Hollywood when they did and was forced to look on as they became superstars while he remained stuck in character roles).

In the film’s climax, Bart and Riggs switch the road signs on the practice field where the army is doing war games (both Buck Privates and Great Guns also ended with climactic war-games sequences as their writers’ way of including a big action climax even though the U.S. wasn’t yet in the war as a combatant when all these films were made). They realize at the last minute that their gimmick with the signs has led one of the practice armies into the artillery range, where another unit is practicing with real shells instead of blanks, and in order to save the troops from beinginadvertently massacred Don has to charge at the unit that’s about to be slaughtered to get them to turn back. In the end Don’s new-found heroism saves the day and he, Bart and Riggs all get promoted from privates to corporals – which Col. Fairbanks had laid down as hsi condition for allowing Don to marry the colonel’s daughter. Caught in the Draft was far more important for its long-term effect on Hope’s career than for anything about the film itself. Paramount’s publicity department decided to promote it by having Bob Hope perform at two actual military bases, including Fort Ord near Monterey, California where the outdoor location work had been done – and Hope loved the experience of performing at military bases so much he literally did it for the rest of his life!