The Cheaters (Republic, 1945)

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

Last night [Wednesday, December 20] I stumbled on two quite interesting Christmas-themed films on Turner Classic Movies, one of which I’d never heard of before and one which was an old favorite of mine but one I hadn’t seen in decades. The one I’d never heard of before was The Cheaters, released by Republic Pictures in 1945 (and reissued for television as The Castaway in 1949) and a quite charming screwball comedy even though 1945 was pretty late in the day for that genre. It centers around a family, the Pidgeons, who are presumably well-to-do but whose finances are about to collapse thanks to the financial failure of the family’s head, attorney and developer James C. Pidgeon (Eugene Pallette at his most Eugene Pallette-ish), whose business manager is trying to convince him that he’s broke. He lives with a wife, Clara (Billie Burke), and their two daughters, Therese (Ruth Terry) and Angela (Anne Gillis). Therese is dating a U.S. servicemember, Stephen Bates (Robert Livingston), whose family also comes from money, and Angela is a stuck-up bitch on the cusp of puberty. They also have a third child, college-age son Reggie (David Holt), who’s as stuck-up as his sisters. James Pidgeon is hoping that the imminent death of his brother will bail them out financially, but unbeknownst to him the brother has left his $5 million fortune to an actress he saw decades before as a child in a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and assigned an attorney to find her whereabouts and give her the money. Meanwhile the Pidgeons take in a “charity case,” a long-retired actor named Anthony Marchand (Joseph Schildkraut, top-billed), not because they’re feeling particularly charitable but because the Bateses take in a charity case every year at Christmas and Therese figures that if her family does so, too, it will impress the Bateses enough that they’ll accept her as a daughter-in-law.

Disabled in a car crash a decade earlier, Anthony has worked his way down a series of increasingly menial jobs until he was rendered homeless after he fell asleep on the job during his last gig as a night watchman and accidentally set the store on fire with his cigarette. Nonetheless, he and James set out to find the mystery woman to whom James’s brother left the $5 million – and actually locate her. She turns out to be struggling young actress Florie Watson (Ona Munson, delivering a nice, down-to-earth performance that’s one of the highlights of the film), and since James has talked his brother’s lawyer into abandoning the search for her if they don’t find her in a week, thereby allowing James to inherit the money, they invite her over for Christmas dinner but secretly want to keep her from finding out that she’s now a multimillionaire. When a local paper publishes the story about her inheritance, the Pidgeons keep it from her, though Anthony sees the paper and figures it out but keeps quiet about it. Ultimately the Pidgeons move to a remote house in the country owned by one of James’s clients, who’s on vacation in England, and because the place has no electricity and no phone service they figure they can keep Florie from finding out about her inheritance for the requisite week. There are also a couple of hard-nosed private eyes who trace the Pidgeons to their country home to blow the whole thing and announce to Florie that she’s really rich and the Pidgeons are trying to keep her well-gotten gains from her. Ultimately, inspired by Anthony’s recitation of parts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the Pidgeons relent and tell Florie about the inheritance, whereupon she and Anthony decide she’ll share half of it with them.

The Cheaters was the brainchild of husband-and-wife writing team Albert Ray and Frances Hyland, and apparently they originally thought it up in the late 1930’s when they offered it to studios with John Barrymore as Anthony and Carole Lombard as Florie. Alas, by the time they’d sold the story both Barrymore and Lombard were dead, he of the long-term damage he’d done to himself by alcoholism and she in a plane crash, and by the time the story finally sold to Republic Albert Ray was dead, too, so Frances Hyland got co-credit for the story with her late husband but took the screenwriting credit on her own. The Cheaters turned out to be a quite good and entertaining movie, an example of the state-of-the-art studio Republic founder and CEO Herbert Yates built for himself and his company. Its director was Joseph Kane, who usually made Republic’s “B” Westerns but this time got a decent-sized budget and a few at least quasi-major stars as well as an “associate producer” credit. I would hardly call The Cheaters a great movie, but it’s certainly well done and charming in its way, and given how notoriously Right-wing Herbert Yates was, it’s surprising to hear at least some vaguely progressive dialogue in the film.

We're No Angels (Paramount, 1955)

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

The next film on TCM’s Christmas-themed schedule – they’re showing Christmas movies continually until the day itself – was We’re No Angels, made at Paramount in 1955 and Humphrey Bogart’s fourth-from-last film. When he made it he had three more to go – The Left Hand of God (a drama instead of a comedy but strikingly similar to this one; in We’re No Angels he plays the leader of an escaped trio of convicts from the notorious Devil’s Island prison on Cayenne in the French Caribbean who helps a storeowner and his family get back on their feet, and in The Left Hand of God he plays a military officer who escapes from the war camp of a Chinese warlord and poses as a priest), The Desperate Hours and The Harder They Fall – and what surprised me about this film more than anything else is how good Bogart looked health-wise. In Beat the Devil, made two years earlier, Bogart had looked like death warmed over and it seemed as if he was already ill with the esophageal cancer that would kill him in 1957, but here he looked surprisingly hale, hearty and even a bit overweight. The film began life as a French comedy called La Cuisine des Anges (“Food of the Angels”) by Albert Husson. Kiss Me, Kate authors Sam and Bella Spewack later adapted it into an English-language play called We’re No Angels and Ranald MacDougall turned it into the screenplay for this film.

The movie was directed by Michael Curtiz, Hungarian expat who’d already worked with Bogart on six previous films, including the classic Casablanca, and the three titular non-angels are Joseph (Bogart), Jules (Peter Ustinov) and Albert (Aldo Ray, who’s not only appealingly hunky but surprisingly good as a farceur). On their way from Devil’s Island – where the sight of convicts on work furlough is apparently common enough that their prison garb doesn’t instantly give them away as escapees – they break into a store managed by Felix Ducotel (Leo G. Carroll, engagingly droll as usual), his wife Amélie (Joan Bennett, whom Bogart got the role after she’d been blacklisted for four years following the scandal in which her husband, producer Walter Wanger, was arrested for the attempted murder of her agent, Jennings Lang, because Wanger thought Bennett and Lang were having an affair) and their daughter Isabelle (Gloria Talbott). Unfortunately, the store is part of an international conglomerate owned by Felix’s cousin André Trochard (Basil Rathbone, the real villain of the piece), who’s coming to investigate and check out the store’s books, with the understanding that he’ll fire and dispossess the Ducotels once he finds out how wretchedly the store is doing. Joseph, who was arrested and sent to Devil’s Island in the first place for financial crimes (the other two were both murderers), determines to fix the books so the store will look sensationally successful, and he uses his skills as a con artist to sell merchandise to unsuspecting customers so the store finally has an income. André makes it off the ship in Cayenne harbor – the one on which the three non-angels were hoping to stow away and make their way back to Paris – despite a quarantine announced by the ship’s doctor (hunky young John Smith), and immediately grabs the store’s books before Joseph has had a chance to alter them. Fortunately, he’s quickly dispatched by Adolphe, the pet viper kept by Albert in a little wicker box.

André’s sudden death leaves his fortune to his son Paul (John Baer), whom Isabelle Ducotel had a crush on, but André had already arranged a dynastic marriage between Paul and the daughter of a major French shipowner whose vessels André wanted access to for his business. Joseph forges a will leaving half André’s fortune to Paul and half to Felix Ducotel, but Paul – who turns out to be just as much of an S.O.B. as his dad – burns the will so he can grab the fortune for himself. It turns out that Adolphe never returned to his cage after dispatching André, so the snake ex machina takes out Paul as well and therefore the Ducotels end up with André’s entire fortune. The three non-angels dress in normal street clothes for the ship that will take them back to France – the first time all movie we’ve seen them in anything other than prison garb – but at the last minute they decide to turn themselves in and return to Devil’s Island, and as they head back there animated haloes appear over the heads of the three convicts as well as above Adolphe’s cage. We’re No Angels is a quite charming film, and Rathbone’s villain performance is easily the most despicable in the movie; though Bogart is still playing a crook, he’s a droll one and quite sympathetic. It’s also welcome as one of only five films Bogart ever made in color; the others were The African Queen, The Barefoot Contessa, The Caine Mutiny and The Left Hand of God. And no sooner was it over that I dug out my old DVD copy of the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood and replayed the May 30, 1938 promotional broadcast featuring Basil Rathbone (who played the principal villain, Sir Guy of Gisbourne, in that movie too) narrating a half-hour précis of Erich Wolfgang Korngold conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in highlights from that film’s amazing (and Academy Award-winning) score, which was truly fun to listen to after Rathbone’s authoritative slimeball in We’re No Angels!

The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (Universal, 1934)

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

Last night (Monday, December 18) my husband Charles and I watched a grey-label DVD of a film that’s a long-time quirky favorite of mine: The Man Who Reclaimed His Head, a 1934 anti-war drama from Universal starring Claude Rains, Joan Bennett and Lionel Atwill and directed by Edward Ludwig based on a play by Jean Bart. I’d tried to chase down this movie for nearly 20 years, starting in the late 1960’s; it would periodically turn up listed in the TV sections of newspapers but it never materialized when it was supposed to. I finally saw it in the 1980’s and wondered if its anti-war politics had anything to do with its damned elusiveness. Later I found out that the trouble was Jean Bart, or rather her estate. She was originally named Marie Antoinette Sarlabous, and though she died in 1955 at the age of 75 her heirs continued to give Universal trouble over the rights to this story. Though Bart co-wrote the screenplay with Samuel Ornitz, in later years she and/or her heirs tried to suppress the film. Apparently part of the trouble was that Universal had done an unauthorized remake called Strange Confession as part of the Inner Sanctum series in 1945, and the credits for that one billed it as “Based on a Composition by Jean Bart” – which made it seem like something she’d written in grade school. (According to imdb.com, various other Universal writers – Finley Peter Dunne, Erwin Gelsey, The Bride of Frankenstein author William Hurlbut, George O’Neil and George Yohalem – are listed as “contributors to treatment.”)

The Man Who Reclaimed His Head starts in 1915, with former journalist Paul Verin (Claude Rains) on the run through the streets of Paris after he’s gone AWOL from the carnage at Verdun, one of World War I’s most notoriously bloody battles. Paul comes to the home of a well-known attorney, Fernand de Marnay (Henry O’Neill), carrying a satchel and with his child, daughter Linette (Juanita Quigley, billed as “Baby Jane” – so there was a real one!), in tow. De Marnay insists that he’s too busy to take on any new cases, but Paul pleads with him to hear his story to the end. De Marnay also looks inside Paul’s satchel, and though we don’t see what he sees he’s sufficiently horrified by the contents that we guess it’s a severed human head. Then Paul relates the story, which begins a year or so before the war begins, when he was a struggling writer and editor in Clichy, a northwest suburb of Paris. He’d just had a bad experience editing a paper called the Bordeaux Radical until he’d had a falling-out with his publisher and financial backer, Henri Dumont (Lionel Atwill). Paul is understandably reluctant to get involved with Dumont again, but his wife Adele (Joan Bennett) is equally determined to see that her husband makes a steady income instead of her having to keep him and their daughter alive on his meager earnings as a free-lancer. The two start a paper called the People’s Voice and Dumont passes off Paul’s anti-war editorials as his own work. Thanks to the paper, Dumont becomes a major political leader in France and attracts the attention of various munitions makers, who try to buy him off. (The head of the syndicate of munitions companies is played by an uncredited Edward Van Sloan.) Dumont also starts romancing Adele Verin – the rotter! – taking her to see Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Paris Opéra (no doubt the big set Universal built for the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney, Sr.) while Paul, stuck at home writing the latest “Dumont” editorial, plays a record of the Prelude for himself and his daughter.

Then Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets assassinated, and overnight Dumont switches sides and becomes a warmonger. Paul has just completed a book about the international arms trade, including documented evidence that the big arms manufacturers are selling to both sides and using neutral Switzerland as a front, but once the war starts his book is suppressed and Dumont takes his evidence and either hides or destroys it. Paul runs into an old friend of his from Clichy, “Curly” (Wallace Ford), who gets beaten up in the street by a mob angry at his questioning the war, and Paul himself is assaulted when he tries to rescue his friend. Paul ends up drafted and rises to corporal – where he ingratiates himself by writing letters for his fellow servicemembers to their loved ones, since many of the men in his company can’t read or write at all – but he learns from gossip within the ranks that every time he gets a leave to go to Paris, Dumont makes sure it’s canceled so he doesn’t have to worry about the competition for Adele. This news makes Paul flee into a rage; he deserts and goes to Paris to confront Dumont – whom he finds with Adele (ironically, she had just told him she was ending their affair, but he refused to accept it). Brandishing his military sword, Paul charges Dumont with murder in his eyes – the vivid closeup of Claude Rains playing this scene is one of the best parts of the movie and its one true horror moment – and … At the end of the story Fernand de Marnay announces that he’ll take Paul’s case, Adele shows up and is reunited with Paul and their daughter, and de Marnay says that by stealing Henri Dumont and severing his head, Paul had literally stolen back his mind and “no jury in the world would convict you.” (Wanna bet? Actually the only way any attorney could have won Paul an acquittal, especially under the French system in which the burden of proof is on the defendant instead of the state, is to plead diminished capacity and possibly analogize the situation to that of David, Bathsheba and Uriah.)

The Man Who Reclaimed His Head was directed by Edward Ludwig, a pretty hacky director with a spotty reputation at best – he later became a favorite of John Wayne and in 1952 made Big Jim McLain, a really silly Right-wing propaganda movie in which Wayne played an investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the trail of Communists plotting a campaign of terror and sabotage in Hawai’i – but here he made a near-masterpiece. (Ludwig began his career in silents as a shorts director, using the name “Edward Luddy,” in 1920, but he didn’t get his first features, Steady Company and They Just Had to Get Married, until 1932, well into the sound era.) The Man Who Reclaimed His Head holds up remarkably well as a parable of capitalism and patriotism run amok, and a character study of a decent, idealistic man caught up and used by greedy bad guys. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, Claude Rains also starred in the 1932 premiere stage production of Bart’s play, and in that version Paul was physically disabled. That, as Charles pointed out, explained the many references to Paul’s ugliness in the dialogue even though he’s not disabled in the film, probably thanks to Rains’s ego. When Universal gave him the starring role in the first sound version of The Phantom of the Opera in 1943, he insisted that he only wear a minimal amount of “scar” makeup instead of the skull-like appearance Lon Chaney, Sr. concocted for himself in the 1925 silent, still by far the best film of this story. It’s certainly ironic to hear the “Marseillaise” on the soundtrack as the French armies march off to the carnage of World War I, especially given the far more famous movie Rains made eight years later, Casablanca, with its quite different use of the “Marseillaise.” And seeing this film right now, after reading Rachel Maddow’s Prequel and at least one of the books from the 1940’s that inspired it, Under Cover by John Roy Carlson, it’s interesting to be reminded of just why so many Americans were isolationist in the 1930’s and how hard it was for President Franklin Roosevelt and his administration to get the U.S. public to support American involvement in World War II; the cynicism with which the arms industry and the politicians who do its bidding by supporting war are depicted in The Man Who Reclaimed His Head was very much a part of the American public mood at the time.

Willie Nelson's 90th Birthday Celebration (CBS-TV, filmed April 29 and 30, 2023; aired December 17, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, December 17) my husband Charles and I watched a CBS-TV special called Willie Nelson’s 90th Birthday Celebration – even though Willie Nelson was born April 29, 1933 and this show was filmed at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl April 29 (Nelson’s actual 90th birthday) and 30, 2023. The show was a pretty typical tribute program, consisting of lots of musical performances by artists with some sort of tenuous connection with Willie Nelson as well as some with quite direct connections – including his sons Lukas and Micah. There were also a few guest MC’s with no discernible connection with music – Helen Mirren, Owen Wilson (who seemed to be there only because he and Willie Nelson are both Texans), Jennfer Garner, Woody Harrelson and Ethan Hawke. Though it was ostensibly a celebration of Nelson the performer and the human, most (though not all) of the songs performed were by Willie Nelson himself. It still irks me that a previous Willie Nelson tribute telecast, though ostensibly linked to his winning the Library of Congress Gershwin Award for his songwriting, was filled with songs Nelson recorded but didn’t write. The show opened with singer Billy Strings doing a quite good version of a Nelson oldie, “Whiskey River,” and playing some virtuosic solo passages on acoustic guitar. Then Norah Jones and Alison Russell did a song called “Seven Spanish Angels” that wasn’t actually a Willie Nelson composition – it was written by Troy Seals and Eddie Setser, and Nelson recorded it as a duet with Ray Charles – though it could have been, with its mood of bittersweet longing. The African-American Russell totally outsang the half-white, half-[East] Indian Jones (she’s the daughter of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar) on the song, but it was still a great performance. Then Helen Mirren introduced Beck, who sang “Hands on the Wheel” – the final song from Nelson’s ground-breaking album Red-Headed Stranger (1975) – with just his voice and guitar (no turntables and only one microphone!), and I couldn’t help but recall the story from Ken Burns’s mega-documentary on country music as to how this album got released. Willie Nelson recorded it in an independent studio in Austin, Texas and sent the tape to Columbia Records as his first album under a new contract with them. Billy Sherrill, head of Columbia’s country division, hated the album and his first thought was to refuse to release it. Then he figured, “On second thought, I’ll release it anyway, it will bomb, and then this guy will do what we tell him to do.” So Columbia released Red-Headed Stranger, it became an enormous hit and landed Nelson on the cover of Time magazine, and Willie Nelson went right on recording albums his way and making a lot of money for both himself and Columbia.

The next singer was Sheryl Crow, doing “Crazy” – the song Nelson wrote in the early 1960’s and placed with Patsy Cline – and though Crow’s version didn’t come close to those of either Nelson or Cline, she still acquitted herself professionally and came up with a quite respectable version. The next artist was Chris Stapleton, who sang “You Were Always on My Mind.” After him came modern-day African-American blues artist Gary Clark, Jr., who was introduced by Owen Wilson with the information that he was going to play the song “Texas Flood” as a tribute to both Willie Nelson and his friend and fellow Texan Stevie Ray Vaughan. Actually it turns out “Texas Flood” was an original by Black bluesman Larry Davis and his arranger, Joseph Scott, first recorded in 1958 on the Duke label (one of the few Black-oriented independent companies actually owned by an African-American, Bobby Robinson). Stevie Ray Vaughan first heard it when fellow Austin white blues singer Angela Strehli played him Davis’s record, and Vaughan chose it as the title song of his first album in 1983. Then Jennifer Garner introduced The Chicks, formerly The Dixie Chicks – who self-sabotaged their own career when they gave an interview during the George W. Bush Presidency and announced that Bush’s policies had made them embarrassed to be Texans. Later they amended their name to eliminate the supposedly racist term “Dixie” -– though they left in the sexist “Chicks” – and on this show they did one of Nelson’s greatest songs, “Bloody Mary Morning,” in a hell-bent-for-leather version that lacked the plaintive quality of Nelson’s original but certainly showed off The Chicks’ instrumental chops. Later Rosanne Cash, daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, came out and did a song by Kris Kristofferson called “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again).” Kristofferson himself came out as a guest artist and the two turned the final chorus into a duet and even kissed each other on the lips at the end. This song isn’t by Willie Nelson but it had a circuitous connection to him: it was featured by “The Highwaymen,” an all-star country supergroup featuring Nelson, Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings that made three albums in the 1970’s and 1980’s and did some joint tours. Alas, Nelson and Kristofferson are the only ones still alive! Then Miranda Lambert came out in a red tasseled jacket and sang “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” a rather odd choice – there are quite a few items from Willie Nelson’s songbook that would have been better showcases for her, but she sang with her usual blend of authority and confidence.

Then came an odd performance of “Georgia on My Mind” – of course written by Hoagy Carmichael, not Willie Nelson, but part of Nelson’s legend because it was the biggest hit from the three albums he recorded of 1930’s and 1940’s standards in the late 1970’s – featuring Jamie Johnson (who’d also performed it at the Library of Congress tribute; I’d damned him as mediocre but he came off much better now, perhaps thanks to the illustrious help he got), Warren Hayes and the legendary Booker T. Jones of Booker T. and the M.G.’s on piano. Then came two of the most haunting songs of the night, Dave Matthews singing “Funny How Time Slips Away” and Willie’s son Lukas Nelson doing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” both with just their own acoustic guitars as accompaniment. After that Woody Harrelson came out to introduce Willie Nelson himself for some quite odd song choices: a duet with Sheryl Crow on the 1940’s hit “Far Away Places,” a duet with rapper Snoop Dogg on “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” (the show’s script had been full of joking references to Nelson’s famously conspicuous cannabis consumption, and this song united two of the most famous potheads of all time – though for someone who’s best known as a rapper, I was pleasantly surprised at how well Snoop Dogg could carry a tune), a strong duet with George Strait on “Sing One with Willie” (apparently Strait wrote this song in the hopes that he would someday get to sing one with Willie for real, which he did here), another Nelson-Strait duet on Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty,” duets with Keith Richards on “We Had It All” and “Forever Wind” – during which Richards joked that he was “surrounded by Nelsons” since Willie’s sons Lukas and Micah were both prominently featured in the band, and a final medley with the full cast joining in on “On the Road Again,” far from one of my favorite Willie Nelson songs but an inevitable way to close the show. Actually the last song was “Happy Birthday,” not a Willie Nelson song either but a welcome inclusion, especially since it’s in the public domain at last.

One thing that amused me about the show was how much retro gear Willie Nelson had on stage; in addition to famous-name amplifiers like Marshall and Fender, his equipment also included low-end brands like Magnotone and Homestead. The Homestead amp was pink and we got enough glimpses of the back of it to see that it was all-tube; no transistors for Willie Nelson! Overall Willie Nelson’s 90th Birthday Celebration was a welcome tribute, though it still irks me that neither here nor at the Library of Congress celebration were any songs performed from what I consider Willie Nelson’s finest album: Phases and Stages (1974), a stunning concept album about a breakup with one side told from the woman’s point of view and one side told from the man’s. Alas, Nelson finished this album and sent it in to Atlantic for release just when the label was shutting down its country division, so it didn’t get the promotion it deserved; instead he signed with Columbia, released Red-Headed Stranger (another country concept album and almost at the level of Phases and Stages), and that became Willie Nelson’s star-making album and the cornerstone of his career.

Robin and Marian (Rastar, Columbia, 1976)

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

Last night (Saturday, December 16) I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies that were both oddly disappointing, though in different ways. The first was Robin and Marian, made in 1976 by Columbia Pictures in association with Ray Stark’s Rastar Pictures, directed by Richard Lester and written by James Goldman with Sean Connery, Audrey Hepburn and Robert Shaw as the top-billed stars. Actually Nicol Williamson as Little John has far more screen time than either Hepburn or Shaw, and Hepburn took the part of Maid Marian for her first film in nine years (since her 1967 home-invasion thriller Wait Until Dark) because her kids were jazzed that she’d be in a film opposite the first James Bond. Lester took on this film after a checkered career that had begun brilliantly with the 1962 teen musical It’s Trad, Dad! (retitled Ring-a-Ding Rhythm in the U.S. because the term “trad” – short for “traditional,” and meaning Dixieland jazz – meant nothing to American audiences) and went into superstar orbit two years later when he was given the job of directing The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night. Lester would go on to make The Beatles’ second film, Help!, and would establish a reputation for modern-day stories with nervy quick-paced editing that anticipated music videos. Lester’s career nose-dived big time when he made a nuclear-war apocalypse film called The Bed Sitting Room (1969), but he came back in 1973 with a cheerily irreverent, campy semi-remake, semi-spoof of The Three Musketeers. He followed it up with a sequel, The Four Musketeers, in 1974, and that gave him the chance to update the Robin Hood legend with Robin and Marian (1976). I haven’t seen Lester’s The Three Musketeers since it was new – and I was mightily impressed by it, finding it charming and being beguiled by its irreverence towards the conventions of costume epics – but I was definitely not impressed by Robin and Marian.

Goldman’s script takes place 20 years after the main story of Robin Hood as told by Douglas Fairbanks (as producer and co-writer as well as star) in 1922 and Errol Flynn in 1938. Shortly after helping restore Richard the Lionheart (Richard Harris, reunited with Connery six years after the two played opposite each other in the 1970 film The Molly Maguires, a tale of 19th century labor unrest in the coal fields with Connery as the leader of a band of saboteurs and Harris as the Pinkerton agent who goes after him) to the throne, Robin Hood left England and his girlfriend Maid Marian behind to join Richard on his ill-fated Crusade to reconquer the Holy Land from the Muslims. In the meantime, Marian became a nun and now leads a convent near Sherwood Forest. Robin and his sidekick Little John return to England with Richard, who still wants to retake the throne from his scapegrace brother John (Ian Holm), who comes off like one of the villains from Game of Thrones (complete with a whining mistress who emerges near-naked from his tent to complain that he’s ignoring her with his business at court). It’s typical of Lester’s and Goldman’s deconstructionist approach to the Robin Hood legend that Richard, who in previous depictions (not only the Fairbanks and Flynn Robin Hood movies but Sir Walter Scott’s 19th century novel Ivanhoe and the various films made from it) was an unambiguous hero, is portrayed as a war criminal who burns a castle with children inside because he’s disappointed with the fact that the three-foot gold statue he was told would be there turns out to be just a rock. Later he and Robin reminisce about the time Richard had thousands of Muslim children similarly butchered en masse during his Crusade. The film is already well past the half-hour mark of a total 145-minute running time when Audrey Hepburn’s Marian finally appears, and it takes even longer for Robin Hood’s old nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw), to show up.

Ultimately the film builds to an action climax of sorts in which the Sheriff gets 200 men from King John to mount an assault on Sherwood Forest to end this Robin Hood business once and for all. The Sheriff camps his men outside the forest, and ignoring the sound advice of Little John that he keep his band of Merry Men inside the woods and not march them out for a direct in-the-open confrontation in which they’ll be outnumbered four times, Robin Hood goes out and challenges the Sheriff to a one-on-one duel to settle the whole conflict. The Sheriff accepts, though for some odd reason Richard Lester shoots virtually the whole fight scene between them in longshots; Lester was an excellent director in certain kinds of scenes, but no one ever accused him of being good at staging action. The Sheriff dies at Robin’s hands but not before severely wounding him, and in the end Maid Marian offers to take him back to her convent and nurse him to health -– only [major spoiler alert!] the drink she gives him turns out to be poisoned, and the scene becomes a murder-suicide in which she kills first him and then herself. The ordinarily lesser talents who made the 1933 Warner Bros. film Ever in My Heart – director Archie Mayo and writers Beulah Marie Dix and Bertram Millhauser – an extraordinary movie about an American woman and a German man who marry on the eve of World War I and then are torn apart by the conflict (it’s basically a reworking of Romeo and Juliet, only instead of two feuding families they’re doomed by two feuding countries) – were able to make a similar ending genuinely beautiful and moving. That feat totally eludes Lester and Goldman here. I remember wishing that someone would have remade and updated Ever in My Heart in the wake of 9/11 – in my putative version the leads would be an American woman and an Iraqi man and 9/11 would have served the plot function of the Lusitania sinking in the original, ramping up American hostility, prejudice and harassment towards Arabs (instead of Germans) in general. That remains one of the potentially greatest unmade movies, and a far cry from the seeming boredom of much of Robin and Marian. And one of the aspects about Robin and Marian that annoyed me the most was Audrey Hepburn’s hair. Once she doffs her nun’s headdress she looks like she’s had a permanent wave – and you’re not going to convince me that they knew how to do permanents in 13th century England, just as I wasn’t convinced that the cave people in Hal Roach’s One Million, B.C. had somehow invented the push-up bra.

Beware, My Lovely (The Filmakers, RKO, 1952)

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

After Robin and Marian Turner Classic Movies showed an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of the 1952 film Beware, My Lovely, which began life as a short story by writer Mel Dinelli called The Man, which was in turn based on a script Dinelli wrote in 1945 called “To Find Help” for the CBS radio series Suspense. The original radio show starred Agnes Moorehead as a World War I widow and Frank Sinatra, of all people, as the hired man she lets into her home who proceeds to terrorize her. Given that Moorehead had already starred in the Suspense drama “Sorry, Wrong Number,” in which a woman overhears a telephone call that lets her know her husband is seeking to have her killed, it’s not surprising she was cast in this type of role – though it is surprising that Sinatra, even this early, was exploring the sort of territory he would later bring to the big screen playing a potential Presidential assassin in the 1954 film Suddenly. The radio show was re-aired in 1949 with Ethel Barrymore as the victim and Gene Kelly as the psycho, though anyone who’d seen the 1944 film Christmas Holiday with Kelly and Deanna Durbin – not the bright, upbeat musical you’d expect from that title and cast but a dark, brooding film noir superbly directed by Robert Siodmak – wouldn’t have been surprised. In 1950 Dinelli adapted “To Find Help” into a short story called The Man and then a Broadway play which did well enough it attracted the attention of The Filmakers [sic]. The Filmakers was an independent production company founded by actress Ida Lupino and her then-husband, producer Collier Young, in the late 1940’s.

They began with a film called Not Wanted in which a woman gets pregnant by a seducer who then abandons her; she goes into what was then called a “laying-in hospital” and is pressured to give up her baby for adoption, then freaks out whenever she sees a baby on the street that resembles hers. Lupino and Young hired veteran silent-era director Elmer Clifton to direct Not Wanted, but he fell ill after a week and Lupino took over the direction herself. It did well enough that Lupino decided her future lay more behind the camera than in front of it, though with The Filmakers she divided herself between directing (including Outrage, a quite good movie with Mala Powers as a rape victim – even though under the Production Code they couldn’t use the word “rape” in the film and they had to call it “criminal assault” – and The Bigamist, with Edmond O’Brien as the title character and Lupino and Joan Fontaine as his two wives, the only film Lupino both directed and acted in) and acting. Alas, The Filmakers’ distribution contract was with RKO, and when Howard Hughes took over the studio and started throwing his weight around, Lupino and company got caught in the crossfire. Beware, My Lovely – a title oddly reminiscent of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, which a previous RKO management had taken off their film version and replaced with Murder, My Sweet because its star, Dick Powell, had previously been known for musicals and audiences seeing “Dick Powell in Farewell, My Lovely” assumed that it was another Dick Powell musical instead of a film noir masterpiece – was a title Hughes insisted on.

It takes place in 1918, as the U.S.’s participation in World War I was winding down, and Lupino plays Helen Gordon, a war widow (though we don’t realize that until midway through the movie; until then we assume her husband, “played” in a photo by William Talman – later the villain in Lupino’s greatest film as a director, The Hitch-Hiker, and still later the hapless prosecutor Hamilton Burger in the Perry Mason TV series – is merely serving in the war, not a casualty of it. She picks up a drifter at the railway station, Howard Wilton (Robert Ryan), and offers him a day’s work as a handyman and housecleaner. We already know all is not right with Howard because we’ve seen him in a prologue doing similar work for another woman whom he finds dead in one of the rooms in her house, though he seems genuinely surprised and at first we don’t know for sure if he killed her or just discovered her body after somebody else did. Once Helen lets Howard into her house, the film becomes another home-invasion story (though in the early 1950’s these weren’t yet the cliché they’ve become since) in which Howard is alternately disarming and crazy, veering between acting nice and doing scary things. Among the scary things Howard does is lock all the doors in Helen’s home and take away the keys so she’s locked in. He also rips out her telephone so she can’t call out for help and no one can call her, either. When a teenage girl, Ruth Williams (Barbara Whiting, songwriter Richard Whiting’s daughter and singer Margaret Whiting’s sister), comes over and alternately gripes about her parents having sent her to Helen’s to clean as punishment and sort-of cruises Howard (she’s a young girl in the full throes of early sexual awakening), comes over, Howard is upset and angry at her. Helen tries to trick Howard into leaving, saying that her roomer Walter Armstrong (Taylor Holmes) is returning the next day, but she’s “outed” by Mr. Franks (O. Z. Whitehead), who wanted Armstrong’s room for the two weeks Armstrong would be out of town.

Later a grocery boy comes over with a food delivery for Helen; though she usually pays her grocery bills all at once at the end of the month, she insists on writing him a check. Only Howard pays him off with $5 in cash ($5 for a whole week’s worth of groceries, even for one person? Isn’t inflation a bitch?) and then catches Helen in her bedroom, where she’d been writing a note on the back of the check saying she was in danger and asking the staff at the grocery store to call the police. Howard catches her writing the note on the check and uses that as an excuse not only to terrorize her but to attempt to rape her as well. Then a Mr. Stevens from the phone company (though he’s wearing a badge on his jacket that makes him look like a cop) shows up to investigate why Helen’s phone is out of order, and Helen takes Howard aside and persuades him to offer him a ride to the train station where they met. Only Howard sees through that, too, and when Stevens finally alerts the cops to what’s going on and they show up to arrest Howard, he slips back into the house and we’re pretty sure he’s going to murder Helen. Ultimately he leaves, but the cops don’t catch him and he goes free at the end, presumably to attempt this in another town with another unsuspecting victim too nice for her own good. There are some nice touches, like Helen’s dog Corky attacking Howard in the leg as soon as he shows up (one wants to yell at Helen, “Your dog knows this guy is bad news! Listen to him!”), and a later scene in which Howard tells Helen (and us) that he tried to enlist in the Army but was turned down for psychological reasons, which he resents.

Eddie Muller said in his outro that he didn’t like the film’s inconclusive ending, and he said if it were remade today Helen would have been played by Jamie Lee Curtis and it would have ended with her invoking supernatural powers and knocking him off. Actually it occurred to me that the most logical modern-day home for this story would be on Lifetime, and it would be pretty much the same except there’d be an epilogue in which Howard would turn up in another town doing the same thing to a different victim. Beware, My Lovely was directed by Harry Horner, who was mostly a production designer – he never directed another feature, though this one’s good and suspenseful enough it seems like he should have – and it benefits not only from the use of the leftover sets from Orson Welles’ mutilated masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) – I’ve often argued that RKO amortized their losses on that film from the number of times they reused its sets – but Horner’s and cinematographer George E. Diskant’s adept use of the built-in capability for elevator-crane shots and overhead angles Welles and his production designer, Mark-Lee Kirk, had designed into the sets in the first place. Beware, My Lovely isn’t a great film by any means – maybe the plot situations seemed novel in 1952 but now they’ve been run into the ground – but it has one saving grace, the delicate performance by Robert Ryan. Most movie psychos seem normal until they suddenly go crazy and stay that way; what makes Ryan’s performance here especially sinister is his skill at flashing back and forth from seeming normality to psycho craziness and back. You really don’t know from scene to scene which he’s going to be, and the terror he puts Helen through comes from her inability to tell from moment to moment which he’s going to be and what’s going to set off his mood changes.

The Mallorca Files: "The Blue Feather". (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, PBS, 2021)

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

Last night (Friday, December 15) at 9:45 – an odd start time for KPBS so they can cram the show in between a dull medical program, Doc Martin, and an even duller alleged “comedy,” Mr. Bean, I watched an episode of the TV series The Mallorca Files called “The Blue Feather.” The Mallorca Files is set on the island of Mallorca (sometimes called “Majorca”) off the coast of Spain, though the lead detectives are British woman Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys) and German man Max Winter (Julian Looman) and they’re not lovers – Max has a local girlfriend, saloon owner and barmaid Carmen Lorenza (Tábita Cerezo), and their immediate supervisor on the police force is also a local, Inéz Villegas (Maria Fernández Ache). “The Blue Feather” is from an ultra-rare local exotic bird, and Max and Miranda find it and realize it’s an important clue to the crime they’re investigating, the mysterious disappearance of British ornithologist Tony Ball (Wayne Foskett). In the opening scene we see Tony Ball literally being netted by an unseen, shadowy assailant and held in a cage-like enclosure. Tony is also a diabetic who didn’t bring along any extra doses of insulin – the last insulin pen he had fell out of his pocket as he was being dragged through the Mallorca countryside in a net – and there’s a legitimate if rather obvious suspense issue: will the cops be able to find him in time to give him the life-saving dose of insulin, or will he die before they get to him? The cops begin to suspect he was the victim of a love triangle involving his wife Linda (Kacey Ainsworth) and her masseur (whom we hear her describe but we never see) – either that or he was out having extra-relational activities of his own – but in the end they decide that the two, though still ostensibly married and living together, have simply drifted apart physically and emotionally without either having alternate partners.

The cops also start to suspect Emilia Alvarez (Alba Ribas), who works for Felipe Santos (José Luis Ferrer – no relation, at least as far as I can tell) at the local bird sanctuary, because she has a criminal record, though not much of one – one charge of assaulting a police officer who was trying to arrest her during an environmental demonstration. Eventually Miranda and Max realize that [spoiler alert!] Felipe is the real kidnapper and his motive was actually noble. It seems that Tony Ball, far from being a bird lover, was in fact a bird smuggler, part of an international gang dealing in rare and exotic birds. Tony would steal the birds from the sanctuary and then pass them along to the other members of the gang. Only Felipe figured out what he was doing and kidnapped him as if he were a target bird, then held him on the sanctuary’s premises. Max and Miranda apprehend Felipe and threaten to prosecute him for murder if Tony goes into insulin shock and dies, and Felipe relents and tells them where he’s holding Tony just in time to save his life. Ultimately the cops arrest both Felipe and Tony. The best element of “The Blue Feather” is the sheer amount of incredibly beautiful Mallorcan scenery we got and the breathtaking footage the cinematographer (oddly unnamed on the show’s imdb.com page, even though the editor, production designer and casting director are!) shot of the local bird flocks that are the subject of the skullduggery. It’s one of the better Mallorca Files episodes I’ve seen, thanks to the moral ambiguity (at the end we – or at least I – clearly like the kidnapper much better than the victim!) and also the blessed absence of the annoying Carmen as an on-screen character this time.