Blind Husbands (Universal "Jewel," 1919)

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

Last night (Monday, May 15) my husband Charles and I finally ended up watching a quite interesting silent film from Universal in 1919, Blind Husbands, Erich von Stroheim’s first film as a director. For the year and a half between the U.S.’s entry into World War I in April 1917 and the Armistice in November 1918, Stroheim had done a land-office business portraying dastardly Hun villains in patriotic movies supporting the war effort. In fact, he’d been so popular in roles like this that the publicity department of Universal, the studio that had him under contract, coined the slogan “The Man You Love to Hate.” Once the war ended, Stroheim realized that the market for these types of roles would quickly dry up, and he searched for something else he could do. What he came up with was a mountaineering film – which had become the mainstay of the German film industry the way Westerns were the mainstay of America’s – in which he would play Austrian cavalry lieutenant Erich von Steuben (a name obviously derived both from Stroheim’s own and the Prussian military officer Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, whom George Washington brought in as a military advisor in 1778 to help win the American Revolution), who’s been stationed to the village of Cortina on the Italian-Swiss border. Stroheim would also direct the film himself and would write the screenplay based on an original story called The Pinnacle, after the mountain the characters seek to climb. It would be a romantic triangle in which Dr. Robert Armstrong (Sam de Grasse) would take his wife Margaret (Francelia Billington) to Cortina, where they had spent their honeymoon years before. Alas, by the time the action in the film takes place the Armstrongs have become bored with each other, which leaves Margaret the proverbial sitting duck for the amorous attentions of Lt. von Steuben – who’s described in one of Lillian Ducey’s intertitles as interested in “wine, WOMEN and song.” We’ve already seen him cruising a waitress (Fay Holderness) at the Cortina hotel’s café, and she understandably gets jealous at the attention he’s now paying to Mrs. Armstrong.

Also in the mix are a young honeymooning couple (Jack Perrin and Valerie Germonprez, who was then Mrs. Erich von Stroheim), a local mountain guide named Sepp (Gibson Gowland, billed as “T. H. Gibson-Gowland” and later the star of Stroheim’s ill-fated adaptation of Frank Norris’s McTeague, Greed), three foolhardy Americans (William De Vaull, Jack Mathis and Percy Challenger) who insist on attempting to climb the north side of The Pinnacle despite Sepp’s warnings and pay the ultimate price for doing so, and a whole regiment of Austrian cavalry officers there to map the mountain. Stroheim originally wanted to call the film The Pinnacle, but Universal president Carl Laemmle thought that would make it seem like a movie about the card game pinochle. According to the imdb.com “Trivia” page, 42 alternate titles were suggested and whittled down to a final eight, from which exhibitors selected Blind Husbands. (Later Stroheim would make another film for Universal in which he played an unscrupulous Army officer – albeit a Russian forced to flee the Revolution – who attempts to seduce the wife of an American tourist in Monaco, and would call it Foolish Wives.) The titles claim it was based on a novel Stroheim wrote called The Pinnacle, but I’ve seen no further evidence that such a book existed and this might have just been Stroheim’s way of sneaking his preferred title onto the film. The original cut of Blind Husbands ran 102 minutes, but for years the only version extant was a cut-down 78-minute reissue Universal prepared in 1924, after Stroheim had left the studio. The version we were watching came from a 2003 DVD by Kino and ran about 93 minutes (though that may just be the 78-minute version slowed down to the original silent-era projection speed), and I’ve read online that in 2022 an Austrian print of the full-length version was just discovered and used as the basis for a complete restoration.

What’s most remarkable about Blind Husbands today is how contemporary it seems in its honest depiction of human sexuality, even though Charles faulted it for its censor-driven understatement; 1919 audiences would have found it shockingly indecent that von Steuben helps Mrs. Armstrong put on her scarf, while in 2023 that seems like no big deal. As I’ve written before about actor-directors, they seem to get understated performances from their casts even if as actors they were unmitigated hams, like Stroheim and Orson Welles. The film is virtually free from the hysterical overacting that was endemic to silent movies generally (partially because that was the style acting schools taught then, and partially because a lot of silent actors thought they had to exaggerate their gestures to compensate for not having dialogue), and for once the title forced onto the filmmakers by others actually makes sense. Sam de Grasse is literally a “blind husband,” oblivious to von Steuben’s real motives towards his wife; in one scene he even tells von Steuben to take care of Mrs. Armstrong while he goes off to attend to the three Americans who fell to their deaths (though of course he doesn’t know they are already dead until he actually reaches them) on the north side of The Pinnacle. There are lots of subtle touches that would have been beyond most filmmakers (aside from Stroheim’s mentor, D. W. Griffith, and his close friend Rex Ingram) in 1919, including the sprig of edelweiss von Steuben sends Mrs. Armstrong as part of his attempted seduction of her. (I’ve long loved the irony of the difference between the use of edelweiss in this film and its role in the other most famous movie referencing it, The Sound of Music. There’s yet another film involving edelweiss, the 1937 Hollywood parody Stand-In, in which Fritz Feld plays a crazy director, obviously based on von Stroheim, who complains that the edelweiss he’s been given for a scene is fake and demands real edelweiss. When he’s told they’ll have to send to Switzerland for it and it will take months to arrive, he folds his arms across his chest and says, “I can vait.”) Von Steuben presents the edelweiss to Margaret in an elaborate wooden box he's bought from a shoemaker and antiques dealer named "Josef Kainz." The real Josef Kainz was a German-Jewish actor who had formerly run the Munich Art Theatre and been one of the Gay Bavarian King Ludwig II's lovers. Later he retired to Vienna and ran an acting school, where Erich von Stroheim was a student.

The finale takes place on The Pinnacle, which Dr. Armstrong and von Steuben are climbing together – Dr. Armstrong actually was ready to leave the night before once he discovered von Steuben’s real intentions towards his wife, but Margaret talked him out of it and said they shouldn’t leave until he’d actually climbed The Pinnacle – when Armstrong sees a letter his wife wrote to von Steuben. The letter blows away before Dr. Armstrong can read it, but he demands to know if the letter was an offer from Margaret to run off with von Steuben. Out of whatever motives – sheer arrogance or gall – von Steuben says yes. Then Armstrong cuts the rope linking him with von Steuben and leaves him to make it down The Pinnacle as best he can. Vultures start flying around von Steuben (a sign of impending doom Stroheim would use again at the climax of Greed, also a scene about two romantic rivals stranded in a forbidding natural location) and he eventually takes a surprisingly unconvincing fall down the mountain (obviously done with a dummy instead of a live stunt person). Then Armstrong successfully makes it down, though he has to be rescued by the Austrian officers, whom Mrs. Armstrong, concerned about her husband’s safety and well-being, had induced to take her up the mountain herself to save him. Armstrong eventually finds the letter she wrote von Steuben, in which she said she loved only her husband and wasn’t going to run off with von Steuben after all. Armstrong naturally feels guilty about having stranded von Steuben on The Pinnacle – an ending prefigured by a plaque we’ve seen earlier which tells of a similar love triangle that happened there in 1869 – and he and his wife leave Cortina together and hopefully have learned from their experience.

Blind Husbands is reminiscent of the German mountaineering films in the almost religious awe it shows for the mountains themselves; in one of Ducey’s intertitles von Steuben says that to him mountains are just big rocks and the only joy he takes in them is in conquering them, and we’re supposed to see the ending as the mountain avenging itself for his irreverence. (One of Ducey’s titles tells us that in so many words.) It also features a religious ritual called the “Feast of the Transfiguration,” which Charles tells me occurs on August 8 – which sets the time of this film as midsummer. Like such other major directors as Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, Stroheim was a Roman Catholic, and narratives of guilt and penance occur quite often in his films – as well as elaborate religious rituals like the stunning Corpus Christi procession (originally filmed in two-strip Technicolor and blessedly shown that way in the current prints) in The Wedding March. Erich von Stroheim’s directorial career started stunningly – Blind Husbands was an enormous hit (according to Valerie Germonprez, it cost just $42,000 to make and grossed over a million) – but soon petered out, partly due to Stroheim’s notorious passion for realism and partly due to the ridiculous myths that got spun around him. In his 1923 film The Merry-Go-Round – from which Stroheim was fired in mid-shoot and replaced by Rupert Julian, of whom one Universal executive told historian Carlos Clarens that he had all Stroheim’s affectations and none of his talent – there’s an early scene in which actor Norman Kerry gets out of bed wearing a monogrammed nightgown. Both the nightgown and the monogram are clearly visible on screen. But the Hollywood rumor mill got hold of it and started the myth that Stroheim had insisted that the hundreds of extras playing Austrian cavalrymen wear similarly monogrammed underwear, invisible on screen – and despite the denials from Stroheim and people who knew him, that absurd story is still being printed as if it were true.

The First Degree (Universal, 1923)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 14) my husband Charles and I watched another double bill from Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature, which is actually on Monday at midnight Eastern time but we get it at 9 p.m. Sunday. The double bill consisted of a 1923 film from Universal called The First Degree, a bleak melodrama starring a quite good actor named Frank Mayo, and one I’d already seen on a previous “Silent Sunday Showcase,” Too Many Kisses (Paramount, 1925), though I was eager to see it again because I think Charles was working the night it was on before and I figured he’d be interested in it. (I wrote a moviemagg blog post on it on November 30, 2020 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/too-many-kisses-paramount-1925.html.) Directed by Edward Sedgwick (who’s usually thought of as a comedy specialist because he was in charge of most of Buster Keaton’s late silents and early talkies at MGM, but who also was brought in to reshoot the ending of the original 1925 Lon Chaney, Sr. version of The Phantom of the Opera after Rupert Julian’s version wasn’t considered exciting enough) from a script by George Randolph Chester based on a story called “The Summons” by George Pattullo, The First Degree turned out to be a surprisingly good film. It was long thought totally lost until the Chicago Film Archive discovered a nearly complete print (containing about 90 percent of the originally released footage) discovered in a batch of instructional films about agriculture. Just how that mistake could have happened became apparent early on, in a scene in which a small-town grand jury is investigating the theft of some sheep belonging to local farmer Sam Purdy (Frank Mayo, top-billed). It’s the sort of small town still common in the early 1920’s when the streets are shared between walkers, bicyclists, horseback riders, horse-drawn carriages and motor vehicles, and the presumably stolen sheep amble down Main Street as if no urbanization is going on.

Sam Purdy has been summoned to testify before the grand jury, though no one will tell him what the case is or why they want to talk to him. When he arrives in the grand jury room he blurts out that he’s killed someone, though he insists it was an accident and he didn’t really mean to. Through a series of flashbacks, Sam Purdy tells his story: he was a respectable employee of a bank and was engaged to marry Mary (Sylvia Breamer, delivering a powerfully low-keyed performance a far cry from the simpering coyness all too many silent-era ingénues fell into) until the piece’s villain, Sam’s half-brother Will Bass (Philo McCullough – I’ve heard of the fictional detective Philo Vance but this is the first time I’ve heard of a real person named Philo!), enters the picture. Will is obsessed with Mary and is determined that if he can’t have her, no one else will – and particularly not his ambitious half-brother. Will gets his chance when the local bank is robbed (I’m not sure but I think we were supposed to think Will, who also worked there, masterminded the robbery) and Sam is caught with the money. He insists he grabbed the tin box containing it from the two real crooks, but nobody except Mary believes him. Sam is convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, and when he emerges he’s spent his time in stir studying law. Two years later he’s been admitted to the bar and is running for county prosecutor when Will shows up again, demanding blackmail money. Sam gives him a small roll of bills but Will decides it’s not enough, and he denounces Sam as an ex-con.

The townspeople literally run him out of town on a rail – they lock him inside a boxcar and send him off as the train pulls out – and Sam ends up in an even smaller town than the two he’s lived in earlier. He gets a job, saves his money and is determined to buy a farm. He’s already made the down payment and taken possession when his nemesis Will shows up and once again demands money. Sam is appalled at the sheer gall of his half-brother turned blackmailer, and the two have a fight on the proverbial dark and stormy night. The fight ends with Sam killing Will – or at least thinking he has – and after he’s told the story to the grand jury, guess who turns up. It’s Will, who’s been arrested for stealing Sam’s sheep (ya remember the sheep?). Will pleads with Sam to tell the grand jurors Sam gave Will the sheep so Will will be let off the hook, and once again Sam is nonplussed that this horrible man who’s already ruined his life in two different places is expecting him to save his ass once again. Sam ultimately refuses to lie for Will, and the grand jury foreman tells Sam that if he had lied the way Will wanted him to, they’d have arrested Sam for perjury. In the end Sam gets his life, his farm and his wife (Mary had taken a trip out of town but she returns just as Sam is being exonerated and released from the grand jury room; she pulls up in a vehicle whose windshield sign identifies it as a “bus” even though it’s just an ordinary car, and Charles wondered whether the person operating it could see through the sign well enough to drive) back and Will gets led off to jail.

Aside from being a fascinating story of a man able to re-invent himself in ways that are impossible now in the age of computers and the Internet, The First Degree is remarkable in the later movie genres it anticipates. The bank robbery itself takes place at night and looks like somebody spliced in a sequence from a film noir made 20 years later (and the cinematographer, Benjamin F. Kline, later shot one of the iconic films noir, Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 vest-pocket masterpiece Detour), while the confrontation between Sam and Will on the dark and stormy night anticipates Universal’s later horror classics – so much so that one expects to see a parade of villagers walk by and ask Sam and Will which way the monster went. The First Degree is quite a remarkable movie, and one wonders why it wasn’t remade in the 1940’s when film noir had become a viable genre: it’s fascinating to imagine Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Sam and Mary, with Raymond Burr as the villain. It’s also intriguing for the main title card, which instead of saying “Carl Laemmle Presents” says “Carl Laemmle Offers” – an intriguing distinction from his usual production credit. Frank Mayo was one actor whose career burned out in the early 1930’s and he ended up working for years in minor character roles, often uncredited; his last film was as the Master Architect in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949) – presumably he designed the Temple of Dagon the revived Samson brought down at the movie’s end – though he survived until 1963.

Father Brown: "The Royal Visit" (BBC-TV, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night I watched a couple of interesting things on TV, including a current (2023) episode of the long-running Father Brown series on PBS courtesy of the BBC. Father Brown was a character created by author G. K. Chesterton that, at least in his TV incarnation, is a middle-aged Roman Catholic priest in central England in the mid-1950’s who helps the local police solve crimes and frequently, like so many other fictional private detectives (as well as some real ones), annoys the police by being right when they’ve got a case wrong. This episode was called “The Royal Visit” and dealt with a planned library opening that was supposed to be attended by Princess Margaret (Olivia Benjamin), younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II and the long-time Queen’s only sibling of either gender. The royal family sends a detail to the small town where Father Brown works to coordinate security arrangements with the local police, headed by Inspector Neil Beckett (Tristan Gemmill). Only just two days before Princess Margaret is supposed to arrive for the opening ceremony (the sort of ritual hilariously parodied in the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night when a tailor gets in the face of John Lennon with a measuring tape and John, in a falsetto imitation of the Queen, cuts the tape with a scissors and says, “I now declare this bridge … open!”), the library is found open and vandalized, and its elderly caretaker, Raymond “Ray” Harrison (Gary Lilburn), dead.

While the city government recruits volunteers to clean up the mess and restore the library to correct order, the police fasten on Amanda Clement (Sarah Smart) and arrest her as the murderess. The royal office in London sends word to the village that Princess Margaret’s visit will be canceled unless someone is charged for the murder and bound over for trial before the Princess arrives. Only it turns out that Clement is actually the victim’s daughter, and had helped him get the job even though Ray is an inveterate criminal and has built up quite a collection of objects he’s pilfered from various townspeople over the years – including a cigarette lighter belonging to Princess Margaret herself that one of her aides borrowed for her own use. (The real Princess Margaret was a heavy smoker and this is believed to have led to her death from a stroke – her fourth – at age 71 in February 2002, over 20 years before her older sister.) Eventually Father Brown deduces from an old 1937 newspaper which Ray had a copy of – his copy disappeared after his death but someone remembered seeing him with it and Father Brown was able to figure out when the paper was from based on the witness’s memory that it had a headline about a soccer match on the front page, and it contained a photo of a detail of a group of then-convicts assigned to tear down a disused factory) – that Inspector Beckett was the killer. He was afraid that Ray would reveal his true identity and cost him his gig at the Palace, so he killed Ray and made it look like a drunken accident or the work of someone else. In the end Beckett is arrested just as he and Amanda Clement are about to go on a date – he’s by far the cutest guy in the dramatis personae and he’s offered to take her to dinner, though he really plans to kill her – and the royal visit goes ahead as scheduled. I was a bit surprised that they actually used an on-screen actress to play Princess Margaret – I had assumed they’d just hint at her presence the way Jesus was depicted in both the 1926 and 1959 versions of Ben-Hur – but they made her a full-fledged character instead, which was nice.

Flamingo Road (Michael Curtiz Productions, Warner Bros., 1949)

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

After that I watched Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies of a 1949 Warner Bros. melodrama called Flamingo Road, starring Joan Crawford in one of the many films she did for Warners following the stunning success of her 1945 comeback film, Mildred Pierce. (Years ago, when my husband Charles and I watched the film Above Suspicion, a 1943 wartime vehicle co-starring Crawford and Fred MacMurray, I noted that both of them were considered over-the-hill then but they both made major comebacks within two years in films based on novels by James M. Cain: MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Crawford in Mildred Pierce.) This one cast her as Lane Bellamy, a carnival dancer who’s stranded in the fictional Southern town of “Boldon” when the carnival she’s working for has to flee an attachment from the local sheriff and leaves her behind. The local sheriff is Titus Semple (Sidney Greenstreet in one of her all-out villain roles – he even gets a speech about how fat men are supposed to be jolly and fun, and he’s working his whole life to keep people from seeing him that way), and his principal deputy is Fielding Carlisle (Zachary Scott, the villain of Mildred Pierce here cast as a sympathetic, though weak, character), who lives in his family’s ancestral home on Flamingo Road in the upper-class district of Boldon. Field (to use the nickname by which everyone calls him) starts dating Lane and ultimately arranges for her to get a job as a waitress at a local café.

Only Field already has an upper-class girlfriend, Annabelle Weldon (Virginia Huston), whom Titus Semple wants him to marry as part of Titus’s plan to build Field’s political career and get him elected first to the State Senate and then to the governorship. There’s a marvelous scene in which the political bosses of the unnamed state (there are hints it’s supposed to be Texas, the real native state of Joan Crawford, but its capital is the fictitious “Olympic City” instead of Austin; in the early 1980’s, after the success of Dallas and Dynasty, Flamingo Road became a short-lived TV series set in Truro, Florida) get together and decide among themselves who the people will be allowed to vote for in the legislative election – a scene that is all too current today in the age of unrestrained partisan gerrymandering that has allowed officeholders to pick their voters instead of the other way around. Dumped by Field, Lane Bellamy hooks up with and ultimately marries contractor Dan Reynolds (Crawford protégé David Brian), Titus Semple’s leading rival for control of the state’s political apparatus. Meanwhile, Field becomes a hopeless alcoholic and ultimately commits suicide after Titus Semple abandons him. Titus institutes an elaborate frame-up to destroy his political rivals in general and Dan Reynolds in particular so he can run for governor himself. Only there’s a big final confrontation between Titus and Lane Bellamy in which they both reach for a gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his fifth BMW) and she more or less accidentally shoots and kills him. The film ends with her visiting Dan Reynolds in prison and pledging that through her efforts he will soon be freed of the charge on which Titus framed him, thereby reuniting with a husband he’d come to suspect she’d only married him for money, position and protection against Titus’s attempts to destroy her.

Flamingo Road began life as a 1942 novel by Robert Wilder, which he later turned into a stage play with his wife Sally, and according to Eddie Muller, Wilder’s deal with Warners for the rights included a guarantee that he’d be credited with the screenplay whether or not he actually adapted the story himself. Producer Jerry Wald, who’d been responsible for bringing Crawford to Warners after MGM fired her and making Mildred Pierce, actually hired two different writers, Edmund H. North and Richard Brooks, to do screenplays for the film, then gave both scripts to Joan Crawford and asked her to choose which one they’d use. Crawford chose North’s, but because of Robert Wilder’s contract North could only be credited with “additional dialogue.” Wald also wanted his Mildred Pierce director, Michael Curtiz, to make Flamingo Road, but by this time Curtiz had left Warners to start a short-lived production company of his own and agreed to return to direct Flamingo Road only if it were a co-production of Curtiz’s own company with Warners. I don’t recall if I’d seen Flamingo Road before – I dimly remember viewing it on an over-the-air broadcast in poor quality, and the only scene I recalled at all was Crawford shooting Greenstreet at the end – though Charles thought we’d seen it together at some point. He might have got it confused with another of Crawford’s Warners vehicles, which aside from Goodbye, My Fancy (in which she gave a surprisingly restrained, at least by Crawford standards, performance as an aging college professor facing retirement) followed pretty much the same pattern as Mildred Pierce: noir-ish melodramas featuring Crawford as a woman on the thin edge of normal morality doing what she has to do to survive in a world stacked against her.

After Flamingo Road – a major hit despite all the angst that went into making it – Crawford did two more movies like it, The Damned Don’t Cry and This Woman Is Dangerous. Eddie Muller in his outro said This Woman Is Dangerous was a deliberately terrible script Jack Warner offered Crawford in hopes she’d turn it down and he could cancel her contract and not have to pay her for her final film under it, but she double-crossed him and made the film – much like Lucille Ball with her Arabian Nights film The Magic Carpet – before hot-footing it to RKO for an independent production, Sudden Fear, that was a huge hit and kicked off the third phase of Crawford’s career. Flamingo Road was photographed by Ted McCord (who did a superb job of evoking the noir look even though much of the film takes place outdoors in daylight) and the musical score was by Max Steiner, who (as he’d done with “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca, also directed by Curtiz) based much of his score on a pre-existing pop song. In this case it was “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight,” the late-1920’s jazz standard by James P. Johnson, and we get to hear Crawford sing along with an instrumental version on the radio in an early scene. (Crawford had a quite acceptable torch-singer’s voice and there are a number of movies, including the early talkie Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which she sings with her own voice – though by 1953, when she made Torch Song for her alma mater, MGM, they used India Adams to dub her.) It’s also a film that reunites two cast members from the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon: Greenstreet and Gladys George, who plays Lute Mae Sanders, owner of the local roadhouse (it’s pretty obviously a whorehouse, though subject to the usual Production Code-mandated veiling, and it’s where Lane Bellamy goes to work after Titus Semple forces her out of her waitressing job and tells her he won’t let anyone else in town hire her), whose real-life descent into alcoholic seediness oddly fits this role quite well.

Her Affair to Die For (Almost Never Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

This afternoon (Saturday, May 13) from 2 to 4 p.m. I watched a rerun of last week’s Lifetime “premiere,” Her Affair to Die For, which put a different “spin” on some of Lifetime’s hoariest clichés. Hot-shot attorney Noah Davis (Ryan Francis, who’s boyishly handsome – in fact, too boyishly handsome and too damned young to be believable as the father of a college student) is being considered for a major promotion to managing partner at his law firm. He’s so consumed with his job that he’s neglecting his wife Liz (Christina Maria Riccardi), who bakes cookies for sale from her own apartment and wants to open a bakery. For that she’ll need capital, and one reason Noah is so desperate for that promotion is that once he’ll be making the higher salary that will come from the new job, he will have enough money to supply his wife with the funding she needs. Noah’s and Liz’s college-age daughter Christina (Logan Mariner) has decided to move out of her parents’ home and get a place on her own, but she needs a roommate to cover half the rent and expenses. After interviewing several possibilities, including a nerdy, heavy-set young man who tells her he “cohabits” with several cats, Christina decides to move in with Alyssa Winters (Meghan Carrasquillo), a tall, strikingly attractive young woman with long blonde hair who shows up for the interview wearing skimpy cut-off denim shorts and a top that reveals a nice cleavage, something director Tamar Halpern (a woman, by the way), writer Erica Land and cinematographer Marcus Friedlander offer lots of nice, hot glimpses of for any straight guys who might be watching this.

The first day Alyssa and Christina are living together as roommates Christina gets a call from Noah saying he’s missing a file he needs for work, and she probably has it. Since Christina can’t get to her dad’s office in time and still make her class 20 minutes later, Alyssa volunteers to run the errand for her – and the moment Alyssa lays her eyes on Noah she’s immediately smitten and determined to break up Noah’s marriage and have him all to herself. Noah’s marriage is already under strain due to the immense amounts of time his job takes from him, and things reach a breaking point between him and Liz when Noah leaves Christina’s birthday party early to handle a crisis at the office. The two of them have a big argument which ends with Noah moving out and spending the night in a hotel, where Alyssa traces him, sees him getting drunk at the hotel bar, and ultimately seduces him. Alyssa has also learned that Noah’s assistant Patricia Burns (Duffy Hale) has a deathly allergy to peanuts, so she does the Münchhausen thing and has a peanut-filled Chinese meal delivered to Patricia at work, then “rescues” Patricia with an Epi-Pen she happens to have with her. It’s already been established that Alyssa is a volunteer nurse at the local hospital, so she knows her way around health care, and she’s more or less dating Dr. Craig Porter (Matthew William Winters), an African-American and best friend of Christina’s boyfriend, another Black guy and fellow student named Marcus Jackson (Jonathon Brown).

As if those intrigues aren’t enough, Noah’s hated rival at work, Peter Buchanan (David Lee Garver), gets the promotion Noah was hoping for thanks to a bit of information about the firm’s biggest client, a businessman whose (economic) partner is secretly the father of a son the client’s wife gave birth to after they had a brief affair. Alyssa hunts down Peter Buchanan and finds him at a bar, where she comes on to him – only it’s a trick: she really wants to borrow his cell phone to send a text to his boss saying he got the job under false pretenses (he bribed Dr. Craig Porter to get the info about the boy’s true parentage), and then she drugs her drink and lures him to follow her in his own car, and he dutifully loses control and crashes into a convenient tree, killing him. Alyssa’s plot unravels when Christina and Marcus are jogging in the local park and Christina sees Noah and Alyssa making out. Noah tries to reconcile with his wife but can’t bring himself to tell her about his extra-relational activity. Meanwhile Alyssa has given Noah a flash drive containing footage of Dr. Porter actually accepting Peter Buchanan’s bribe, and tells him to use it to get the promotion he thought he deserved and Peter did him out of, only to die in the car crash that everyone in the office is assuming was suicide.

Had Woody Allen been writing and directing this, it would have no doubt ended with Noah pairing up with Alyssa and Noah’s wife Liz ending up with Sam Harrison (Mike Boland), the man who offered to loan Liz the money to build her bake shop and for that reason Noah assumed Liz and Sam were having an affair. Instead this is a typical Lifetime movie with a typical Lifetime ending: it turns out Alyssa did this at least once before, in Texas (the film is set in Georgia – we know that because of one of the license plates we see on a car – no doubt to take advantage of Georgia’s generous tax credits for film projects made there), and Christina is able to use Alyssa’s old I.D. to trace her previous affair with a married man, a doctor at a hospital where she worked. The Texas doctor tells Christina that Alyssa – or Victoria Daniels, as she was known then – murdered his wife and is still wanted by Texas cops. She’s also wanted for a few murders in Georgia, including Peter Buchanan’s and also Dr. Porter’s (she killed him and stuffed his body in the trunk of her car). I admire Erica Land for her sheer skill at crowding this many intrigues into her plot, and also for holding off on making Alyssa too blatantly evil until her schemes unravel. In fact I liked the intriguing variation of making the male victim of the villainess’s obsession a man old enough to be her father. Otherwise, Her Affair to Die For is a slightly better-than-average Lifetime movie with a few variations to Lifetime’s familiar formulae, but not so many that it doesn’t deliver the goods Lifetime is famous for, including a “pussy in peril,” albeit from another pussy.

The Phenom (Elephant Eye Films, Conquistador Entertainment, RLJ Entertainment, 2016)

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

Last night (Friday, March 12) my husband Charles and I watched a truly odd 2016 movie called The Phenom, about a young pitcher named Hopper Gibson (Johnny Simmons), who’s blessed with a killer fastball and impeccable control until one night, playing in a major-league game for the Atlanta Braves, he throws five wild pitches in a row and gets demoted to the minor leagues. Written and directed by Noah Buschel for a studio called RLJ Entertainment, The Phenom is a surprisingly gloomy movie – probably the most depressing modern-dress film I’ve seen since the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas, directed by Mike Figgis and starring Nicolas Cage as a burned-out Hollywood screenwriter and Elizabeth Shue as Sera, a prostitute who’s similarly burned out and hooks up with Cage’s character on his way to drinking himself to death. The team Hopper pitches for hires a psychiatrist named Dr. Mobley (Paul Giamatti, two years after his sensational performance as real-life therapist Dr. Eugene Landy in the Brian Wilson biopic Love and Mercy, in which he was so convincing the real Brian Wilson, visiting the set, freaked out at the sight of him), to try to help him get his mojo back.

Hopper is a virtual basket case, having long since lost any sense of fun in the game and feeling pressured not only by the team’s dependence on him but also the burden of his own father, Hopper Gibson, Sr. (a marvelous performance by Ethan Hawke – and for once Ethan Hawke and Johnny Simmons look enough alike they’re believable as father and son), who was himself a hot-shot pitcher once upon a time until he burned out and ended up a drug addict and petty criminal. Hopper, Jr. bought a palatial mansion for his mother, Susan Gibson (Alison Elliott), no doubt with his signing bonus from the Braves. He also has a sort-of girlfriend, Dorothy Boyer (Sophie Kennedy Clarke), though their relationship is sufficiently on the rocks that one night, while on tour with his minor-league team, he allows himself to be picked up by Candace Cassidy (Louisa Krause) – only it’s a trap. Candace’s boyfriend invades her room with a shotgun and the two rob Hopper at gunpoint, though it’s unclear just how much they get out of him. Meanwhile, Hopper, Sr. signs on to a gang that promises him that proverbial “one last job” that will supposedly make him enough money to set him up for life – only, like so many “one last jobs” in the history of crime films, the caper, involving smuggling drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border, gets all the participants busted and facing long prison sentences. Hopper, Jr. goes to visit his dad in jail and dad essentially tells him that he shouldn’t waste his time, energy and concentration on supporting him.

The film eventually drags its way to an open-ended finish in which the Braves, running out of pitchers just as they’ve entered the playoffs, call Hopper back to the majors – only we don’t see what happens after that! A classic-era director and writer doing this story would have had Hopper break out of his “yips,” as they’re called in the dialogue, win the big game for his team, get married to Dorothy and live happily ever after. Given the overall tone of this film, both Charles and I were expecting a downbeat ending in which Hopper would lose the big game for his team and end up a physical and psychological wash-out headed for the same dire fate as his dad. But either of those endings would have been preferable to the non-ending we got – and Charles and I both noted that this was the second night in a row, after the 1947 Barbara Stanwyck vehicle The Other Love, we’d seen a film with this sort of non-ending. While Stanwyck was no doubt disappointed that the makers of The Other Love didn’t give her the sort of bravura death-bed scene Bette Davis had got in Dark Victory and Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights (and decades later Ali McGraw would get in Love Story), at least The Other Love’s director, André De Toth, powerfully suggested her death by pulling the camera back from the bungalow she and her doctor turned husband (David Niven) were sharing. Noah Buschel didn’t give Johnny Simmons the chance to act anything suggesting the ultimate fate of his character, good or ill.

Live at the Belly Up: Stranger, Paul Cannon Band (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2014)

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

After The Phenom Charles and I watched a Live at the Belly Up rerun from 2014 featuring two San Diego-area bands, Stranger and the Paul Cannon Band. Though both Stranger’s leader, David Ornelas, and Belly Up manager Chris Goldsmith identified Stranger as a reggae band, their music sounded to me much more like ska, the earlier variant of Jamaican pop-rock. The bouncy rhythms of Stranger’s music and the full horn section (trumpet, trombone and tenor sax, though only the saxophonist got to solo; the trombonist literally twirled his instrument on some songs, much like a cheerleader’s baton) are much more characteristic of ska than reggae. During their half-hour of the show’s 55-minute time slot Stranger did six songs – “Royalty,” “Now Is the Time,” “You Got It,” “Never Want the Night to End,” “Universal Love” and “Under Control” – of which the first four dealt with good times, partying and relationships while the last two took feints at social comment and got a bit preachy. I had the same problem with Stranger that I’ve had with a lot of the bands on Live at the Belly Up and other shows like it: their songs sounded too much like each other. The only one that stood out for me was “Never Want the Night to End” because of the guest vocalist, a woman Ornelas introduced as “Piracy Melsie” (at least I think that’s her name), who strolled onto the stage wearing a skimpy black top and matching black shorts and jacked the energy level up considerably. David Ornelas had a serviceable voice; Piracy Melsie (or whatever her name is) was a good deal better than that, singing with real insight and passion and vastly improving the quality of the music.

I suspected I’d like the Paul Cannon Band better, if only because Chris Goldsmith introduced them as blending country music, folk and soul, and I did even though they were hardly that special, either. Paul Cannon said he started out as a solo singer-songwriter, bringing himself and his acoustic guitar to open-mike nights. Then he added a cello player, and by the time he did this Live at the Belly Up gig he had a four-piece band with himself on vocals and acoustic guitar, an electronic keyboard player (judging from the tenor sax that stood in a holder next to him, I suspect he doubles on other instruments even though he didn’t play anything but keyboards all night; I wondered if he was the cello player Cannon said he used to use), electric bass and drums. Cannon did five songs: “Lucky Ones,” “On the Mountain,” “Broken Palace,” “Truth,” and the closest he came to a hit, “Homegrown.” I found his vocals O.K. but a bit annoying because of his overuse of the Bob Dylan drawl, though at least two of the songs had strong local connections. “Homegrown” actually mentions San Diego and achieved major radio play on a local station, which led to its adoption by the San Diego Padres major-league baseball team as a theme song.

And while Paul Cannon said he had no idea what “Broken Palace” meant when he wrote it, within a year or two he’d befriended San Diego Chargers professional football player Junior Seau, who suffered from long-term concussion-related injuries that caused him so much ongoing pain he committed suicide on May 2, 2012 by shooting himself in the chest. At the time Paul Cannon’s Live at the Belly Up episode was filmed Seau had been dead for only two years (or less), and one could tell that the traumatic wound of losing his friend was still raw for Paul Cannon. On “Lucky Ones” and “Homegrown” Cannon and his band were joined by two women backup singers who, as Piracy Melsie had done with Stranger, added a great deal to the band. They were Lindsay White and Veronica May, and while May looked female White had her hair cut very short and was wearing a white dress shirt, a necktie and tan slacks. Only the absence of a basket in her crotch and the hint of breasts under that white shirt gave her away as female – and even so I’m not altogether sure whether they’re a woman, a man or non-binary. In fact, the two looked like a Lesbian couple, with White as the butch and May as the femme, though I have no idea what their sexual orientations or gender identities are. Overall, this Live at the Belly Up episode featured two very good local bands but neither seemed to have much to offer beyond that. If I’d been to the Belly Up Tavern the night this show was filmed I’m sure I would have enjoyed it, but other Live at the Belly Up shows have featured either bigger bands with broader reputations or San Diego-based acts like Sara Pettite who were stronger than either Stranger or the Paul Cannon Band.