Amish Affair (Muse Entertainment Enterprises, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, July 7) I watched three new Lifetime movies in quick succession: the previous night’s “premiere,” Amish Affair, and two films scheduled back to back as last night’s “premieres,” Couples Retreat Murder (which is almost as bad a title as Armored Car Robbery, the 1950 RKO film gris – my term for a movie that attempts but does not achieve film noir – I’d watched the night before instead of Amish Affair) and Daddy’s Deadly Secret. Movies featuring the Amish – a long-term religious order/cult based in Pennsylvania who reject the implements of modern technology (they’re not allowed to drive, use phones or farm with modern tools, and they croak ahead of schedule fairly often because they’re not allowed to pasteurize their milk either) – have been a “thing” at least since the 1985 film Witness, a haunting movie in which Harrison Ford played a homicide detective who had to live among the Amish to find evidence in a murder case. (The gimmick was that the killer was a fellow cop who’d turned corrupt and the only witness was an eight-year-old Amish boy who’d seen the killing go down and whom Ford’s character had to keep alive.) Witness begat an intriguing TV-movie knockoff in 2004 called Plain Truth in which Mariska Hargitay, best known as Olivia Benson on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, played a defense attorney whose client is an Amish woman accused of killing her own baby. (It may have cast her as a defense lawyer instead of a cop, but she was still basically Olivia Benson.) This one was a major step down on the quality ladder from both those two whose main appeal seemed to be to explore the kinkiness of how normal sexual desires manifest themselves in a community so rigidly repressive.

Mackenzie Cardwell stars as Hannah Reid, a woman who was born into an Amish community but left to live among “the English” (Amish-speak for anyone non-Amish), trained as a nurse and even got a driver’s license. She later returned to Amish life but was driven out of one Amish community when the person she was supposed to be caring for, an elderly cancer patient, died and she was accused of euthanizing him. Somehow Hannah has been able to land a caregiver job at another Amish community, where Aaron Stutzman (Ryan McPartlin, who’s drop-dead gorgeous whenever the filmmakers, director Robin Hays and writer James Phillips, get him out of his Amish duds, which is often) needs a person with medical experience to care for his disabled wife Sarah (Dana Stoutenberg, who gives a quite remarkable performance as a woman consciously rejecting medical attention and trusting in God to determine her fate). Sarah has been diagnosed with ALS and Hannah keeps trying to get Aaron to get her some of the standard treatments (even though my understanding is ALS is incurable and the so-called “treatments” wouldn’t do her any good except reduce her pain). Breaking all the rules of Amishism, Aaron and Hannah start a sexual affair – and Robin Hays shows a lot more of them “in the flesh” than is usual for Lifetime’s soft-core porn scenes, including letting them get naked when we’re usually expected to believe that even people penetrating each other are doing so with their shorts on. Aaron wants Hannah to marry him whenever Sarah croaks, not only because he has the hots for her but because Sarah had only been able to bear him girls, daughters Rachel (Maemae Renfrew) and Grace (Evelyn Burke), and he wants a son to continue the family name.

There’s also another woman in Aaron’s life, Laura Miller (Gigi Neil), who’s the bookkeeper for Aaron’s buggy repair business (I’m not making that up, you know!) and who has an unrequited crush on him; and another male interested in Hannah (albeit completely licitly), Jacob (Sebastian Greaves, who’s cute instead of hunky but equally fun to look at). Jacob and Hannah go out on dates, where the Amish idea of a hot time is eating ice cream together, until a jealous Aaron leaks derogatory information about Hannah’s past to Jason and forces him to break off their budding relationship. Then Sarah finally dies, and the non-Amish cop who investigates the case, Sgt. Riley (Ese Atawo), gets a court order to exhume Sarah’s body and an autopsy reveals she died of rat poison. Both Hannah and Laura become suspects, though in the end [spoiler alert!] Aaron actually poisoned his wife after Hannah had insisted that they had to stop their affair and couldn’t be romantically or sexually involved “as long as you’re still married to Sarah.” Aaron briefly throws off suspicion by giving himself a sub-lethal dose of the same poison he used to kill Sarah, but in the end he turns out to be just another sexy Lifetime villain in an odder costume. In the end he tries to kill Hannah, whom he’s decided is an agent of Satan sent to corrupt him, with a pitchfork. He manages to wound Jason when Jason tries to intervene, but ultimately he’s taken out by another woman in the community (I can’t for the life of me remember who). Amish Affair is just another Lifetime movie with the schtick of being about the Amish and titillating us with the thought of all those nice, prim, proper people seething with unfulfilled lusts under those eccentric medieval clothes. (Weird Al Yankovic once did a parody song about the Amish that contained the great line, “We’re gonna party like it’s 1399.”)

Couples Retreat Murder (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next Lifetime movie, Couples Retreat Murder, was so annoying and stupid it made Amish Affair look like a masterpiece by comparison. Rebecca “Becky” Curtis (Jessica Morris) and her husband, attorney Jim Curtis (Rib Hillis, who’s got one of the greatest pair of man-tits I’ve ever seen even though, alas, we don’t get the topless shots of him I was hoping for!), have a stale marriage. Becky goes out for a night on the town with her old college friend Paulina (Natalie Daniels), who’s married to Phil (Corin Nemec), a spoiled rich kid Becky briefly dated in college before she met Jim. Paulina suggests that the Curtises join her and Phil on a “couples’ retreat” vacation at a desert resort called “Lotusland.” (I presume the name was writer Adam Rockoff’s idea of irony.) Lotusland is run by a phony therapist named Alan Brant (Alex Trumble), and among his demands of his guests are no alcohol, a strict vegetarian diet, no cell phones – he confiscates them as they sign in – and a strict regimen of group “therapy” sessions that seems far more like a drill camp than anything truly therapeutic. Among his other assignments for the hapless guests is sending Jim, Becky, Phil and Paulina on a nature hike through the unspoiled desert to an unspecified location where they will supposedly “get it.” When the stay starts there are at least two other couples there, Joel and Jenny Rollins (Adam Russ and Kianna Vo) and Steve and Erica Persky (Eddie Blackwell Williams and April Hale). But when they get back from the nature hike the other couples are gone and so is Phil. The two remaining couples find the dead body of Alan Brant on the premises and determine to leave the place, only they find that their cars’ tires have been slashed and the cars have been drained of brake fluid.

Earlier in the piece Jim’s wallet had mysteriously disappeared from his night table, then just as mysteriously reappeared, and we’d seen a few shots of a shadowy figure dressed in boots with elevated heels skulking around the facility and, in one shot, cutting the telephone lines to render the resort’s one landline – its only working phone once Brant confiscated all the residents’ cell phones – inoperative. Through most of Couples Retreat Murder I was irritated by a common fault of modern-day movies: no one in the dramatis personae we actually like. Then we get a shot of Jim Curtis and Paulina necking, and we realize [spoiler alert!] that the two of them were having an affair and concocted this whole elaborate plot to get rid of their current and suddenly inconvenient spouses. In the big final confrontation, when Becky asks Jim why, if he wanted to be rid of her, he didn’t just divorce her instead of joining Paulina’s plot to kill her and Phil, Jim says it was because of the life-insurance policies he and Paulina both had on their current spouses. Doubtless the fortune Paulina stood to inherit from Phil once he was out of the way was a factor, too. And Brant also ended up dead in Jim’s and Paulina’s plot because he’d been accused of fraud in a previous case and, after Jim got him acquitted, Brant stiffed him on his fee. Ultimately the state police – alerted in a previous scene in which Becky realized that, even if the cars themselves had been rendered non-functional, their electrical systems still worked and could be used to access the Internet – arrive and take both Jim and Paulina into custody. (The moment I saw those great man-tits and their nipples poking through Rib Hillis’s tight T-shirts, I just knew he was going to turn out to be a bad guy!) About the only good things about Couples Retreat Murder are the stunning shots of desert scenery director Amy Barrett (not the one who’s currently on the U.S. Supreme Court!) and cinematographer Lars Lindstrom got into it, and those thoroughly deserved a better movie!

Daddy's Deadly Secret (CME Summer Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles returned from work in time to watch – or at least be here during – all but the first half-hour of the third Lifetime movie I watched last night (Sunday, July 7), Daddy’s Deadly Secret. This was actually the best of the three, though the phrase is only relative. Directed by Sean Cisterna (wasn’t that where they imprisoned John the Baptist?) from a script by Leo McGuigan – who, judging from his work here, is a believer in my paraphrase of Lewis Carroll’s adage that a person should write at least six impossible things before breakfast – Daddy’s Deadly Secret is a melodrama over-the-top even by Lifetime standards. Dr. Caroline Wallace (Sarah Allen) is a successful psychotherapist and she’s married to Richard Wallace (Steve Byers). He brought with him a nine-year-old child named Abigail Jones (Maya Misaljevic) whom he claims is his from a previous marriage to Ellie Mercer (Andréa Grant). Ellie in turn has remarried and is now the wife of Doug McGill (Steve Belford), whom Richard, some sort of land developer, is trying to help out by giving him some contracting work on a city project. It gets even more complicated than that: Caroline is seeing a particularly demanding and obnoxious patient named Beth (Kendall Wright), who because agoraphobia is one of the conditions Caroline is treating her for, insists that Caroline must come to her place for their sessions. She’s also driven to call Caroline at 9:30 p.m. and other, shall we say, unusual hours for therapy sessions.

The plot thickens (or coagulates) when Abigail doesn’t return home from school and no one either in her immediate circle nor in the school administration has any idea where she is. There’s a red herring involving a gang of four 12-year-old students who call themselves “the Runaway Girls” because they all come from dysfunctional home lives. The Runaway Girls like to hang out in an old, disused convent near the school – which the school has declared off limits to students – but the parents check it out anyway and that gives director Cisterna a chance to do some nicely atmospheric shots of its crumbling walls and ceilings. Daddy’s Deadly Secret is one of those stories in which the various levels of plot peel off like an onion and reveal various hidden truths, partial truths and total non-truths underneath. They trace Abigail’s Social Security number (at nine? I didn’t have one until I was 19!) to a different person altogether, a girl who died in infancy. (That used to be a quite common way of stealing a new identity: find a person who was born around the same time you were but died in infancy, obtain their birth certificate and use that to claim their identity and get documents saying you were that person. It ended when, in order to prevent it, government births-and-deaths record offices started being much more careful about who they gave birth certificates to and imposed regulations that you had to be either the person named or a close relative to obtain theirs.) Then Caroline gets a report from the fertility doctor she and Richard have been seeing that says that Richard cannot have children – he screwed up his sperm count during a three-year bout with opioid addiction, from which his sister Darla, the same woman Caroline has been seeing as a therapy patient named “Beth,” also succumbed and never recovered – which just adds to the suspense and uncertainty as to just who Abigail is and how she came to exist.

Ultimately it turns out that Abigail was the daughter of Doug McGill and Marianne Cunningham (Ferelith Young, whose first name sounds more like a rock formation than a person), who works at Abigail’s school as a crossing guard and who’d been buddy-buddy with Caroline but was determined to steal back her kid and raise her as her own. The police, in the person of Officer Holly Parker (Mercedes Leggett), investigate the case, but during a rather tense interrogation Richard receives word that Abigail has been traced to Marianne’s mountain cabin (not another mountain cabin in a Lifetime movie!) and steals Officer Parker’s car keys to drive out there and rescue Abigail himself. Darla a.k.a. “Beth” showed up at the police station when Richard and Caroline went there to report Abigail missing in the first place, got a good look at Ellie’s husband Doug and yelled out, “I know who you are,” before she was later found murdered. Ultimately it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Doug is really a notorious escaped murderer who killed his previous girlfriend when they were still in high school, then hooked up with Marianne and then Ellie, only he regularly beat up both of them and left wounds on Ellie’s body that Caroline saw but attributed to “accidents.” (A lot of physically abused women tell their friends that they got their bruises and other wounds from “accidents.”) In the end Doug gets killed in self-defense by one of the good characters, Marianne is arrested for kidnapping Abigail but in light of the circumstances, especially once Richard and Caroline vouch for her, she gets a light sentence, and within a year she’s out and the four of them – Richard, Caroline, Marianne and Ellie – are essentially co-parenting Abigail. Daddy’s Deadly Secret was actually pretty good but was done in by the sheer number of improbabilities Leo McGuigan put into his script and the convoluted plotting, though I liked the scenes in which Caroline tries to use therapy-speak to persuade Marianne not to kill her. One wonders if McGuigan’s inspiration was the incident about a decade ago in which a woman held hostage by an ex-con was able to persuade him to release her by quoting excerpts from Rick Warren’s self-help book The Purpose-Driven Life at him!

The Day the Earth Stood Still (20th Century-Fox, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 6) I put on Turner Classic Movies at 7:30 p.m. for the second half of their double bill of science-fiction films about relatively beneficent aliens visiting the Earth. The first was Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which I’d commented about relatively recently on the moviemagg blog: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/03/close-encounters-of-third-kind-julia.html) and the second was the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I did a moviemagg review of this film when the DVD of the remake with Keanu Reeves came out in 2009 and posted it to https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/04/three-days-earth-stood-still.html; I called the post “Three Days the Earth Stood Still” and compared both the 1951 and 2008 movies to the original source for the story, Harry Bates’s “Farewell to the Master,” published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940. Bates’s story has almost nothing in common with either film; it takes place well in the future (when humans have already been to Mars and back and have developed ray guns and television) and all the human characters in the 1951 movie were added by the screenwriter, Edmund H. North.

About all Bates’s story has in common with the 1951 film, written by North and directed by Robert Wise (a graduate of both Orson Welles’s and Val Lewton’s training programs, and it shows) is the arrival of a flying saucer on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C.; its two occupants, a humanoid named Klaatu and a robot companion named Gnut (renamed “Gort” by North, I’m sure just to give the actors something easier to pronounce); and a scene in which Gnut/Gort is encased in high-tech plastic to immobilize him but he’s able to escape by heating his own body to such a degree that the temperature melts it. “Farewell to the Master” builds to an O. Henry-esque climax in which Cliff Sutherland, a D.C. journalist who’s the principal interlocutor between the aliens and the human race, sees Gnut and the temporarily resurrected Klaatu off as they return to their home planet. Sutherland tried to apologize on behalf of the human race for the religious fanatic who shot Klaatu with a ray gun, thinking he was an emissary from Satan out to conquer the human race, and said to Gnut, “‘But will you promise to tell your master — just those words — as soon as he is arrived?” Gnut replied, “You misunderstand. I am the master.” Bates also left powerfully ambiguous just why Klaatu and Gnut came to Earth, while North supplied an explanation that made The Day The Earth Stood Still a surprisingly powerful pacifist “message film” that went very much against the grain of the Cold War Zeitgeist.

Indeed, the most poignant aspect of The Day the Earth Stood Still in 2024 is how much its politics go against the grain of today; at a time when nation after nation (with the surprising exception of Great Britain) is voting into office Right-wing pseudo-populists with nothing but contempt for the rest of the world and the idea of international cooperation, The Day the Earth Stood Still seems as wildly out of step with the times in 2024 as it no doubt did in 1951. The explicit message of the movie is that Klaatu’s and Gort’s planet has organized a united federation (forgive the anticipation of Star Trek here) in which robots like Gort are the enforcers. They are programmed to act ruthlessly to stamp out any form of aggression that arises on one of the member planets and cannot be hacked or reprogrammed – though the film features the famous stop-code, “Klaatu barada nikto,” which Klaatu gives to his human friend, Helen Benson (Patricia Neal, playing the female lead in a Left-wing message movie three years after she’d starred in a Right-wing one, The Fountainhead), to tell Gort when he is intent on destroying the human race after they have mortally wounded Klaatu (which happens twice in the film).

In his 1967 book An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, Carlos Clarens faulted The Day the Earth Stood Still for the awfully human-sounding threats and ultimata Klaatu gives to the human race, but it seems to me like Robert Wise and Edmund North were on the right track here. The members of Klaatu’s federation remain susceptible to the temptations of violence and aggression, so they need to have a sort of robot police force either to neutralize aggression or to eliminate the creatures who’d perpetuate it. North even gave Klaatu a speech in which he analogizes Gort and his fellow robots to human police officers deputized to fight human crime. This time around I liked the touch that in the opening scene in which an Army detachment confronted the space visitors, Gort just vaporized their weapons without harming them; later, after a soldier has mortally wounded Klaatu, Gort vaporizes not only the soldiers’ weapons but the soldiers themselves. (“The first red-shirts,” I joked.)

As I said before, Robert Wise trained as a filmmaker under both Orson Welles and Val Lewton, and Welles’s influence comes through mainly in the early scenes in which we’re given exposition about the space aliens via simulated news radio and TV broadcasts – much the way Welles did in his fabled Hallowe’en 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Lewton’s influence comes through most strikingly in the scene in which Benson’s son Bobby (Billy Gray) follows Klaatu, who’s boarding with them under the name “Carpenter” (one of the cleverer allusions to Christian mythology – there’s also a much clunkier one, more on that later), to the site where the flying saucer landed and sees Klaatu enter it, thereby realizing that the nice “Mr. Carpenter” is actually the space visitor everyone is trying to hunt down. The clunkiest line in the script was actually written not by Edmund North, but by Joseph Breen, Roman Catholic Jesuit priest and head of the Production Code Administration at the time. He demanded that the filmmakers insert a line in which Klaatu would acknowledge that his resurrection would only be temporary by saying, “That power is reserved for the Almighty Spirit!,” thereby acknowledging the supremacy of the Judeo-Christian “sky god” over whatever religion there was on Klaatu’s and Gort’s home planet.

Armored Car Robbery (RKO, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 6), after The Day the Earth Stood Still, Turner Classic Movies showed something called Armored Car Robbery under the rubric of Eddie Muller’s weekly “Noir Alley” telecast. Even Muller admitted that there’s nothing particularly noir about Armored Car Robbery, a film whose clunky title betrays its origins as an attempt by RKO to get out a film that would compete with John Huston’s “caper film” masterpiece, The Asphalt Jungle. The Asphalt Jungle and Armored Car Robbery were even released on exactly the same day: June 8, 1950. And there was an even quirkier connection between the two films: the “bad” girl in The Asphalt Jungle was played by Marilyn Monroe, while the “bad” girl in Armored Car Robbery was played by Adele Jergens, who’d played Marilyn’s mother in the 1948 “B” musical Ladies of the Chorus (even though Jergens was just nine years older than Monroe). I’d watched Armored Car Robbery, directed by Richard Fleischer from a script by Earl Felton and Gerald Drayson Adams based on a story by Robert Angus and Robert Leeds, some years ago with my husband Charles on a VHS tape I’d recorded off an earlier TCM showing, and I’d remembered it as better than it now seems to be. It’s basically a duel of wits between police lieutenant Jim Cordell (Charles McGraw, unusually cast as a good guy for a change) and his nemesis, criminal mastermind Dave Purvis (William Talman, later hapless prosecutor Hamilton Burger on the TV series Perry Mason; when Charles and I watched Talman play a psycho killer in the 1953 film The Hitchhiker, directed by Ida Lupino from a script by Daniel Mainwaring and a much better movie than Armored Car Robbery, Charles joked, “No wonder he was such a lousy prosecutor! Now we know which side of the law he was really on!”)

Purvis, who’s so careful about concealing his identity he cuts the labels out of his shirts and discomfits his friends by moving often, organizes an armored car robbery at L.A.’s Wrigley Field (not the famous one in Chicago but one the Wrigleys built in L.A. to house the original Los Angeles Angels, a minor-league farm team for the Chicago Cubs). Purvis hangs out at Wrigley Field and calls in a false alarm to the police so he can time exactly how long it will take them to respond to a real one. The armored car robbery actually takes place in the first reel and the rest of the movie is about how the interpersonal relationships between the crooks who pulled it off – Purvis, Benny McBride (Douglas Fowley), Al Mapes (Steve Brodie) and William “Ace” Foster (Gene Evans) – break down during the aftermath and lead the police to be able to catch them. Benny is married to stripper Yvonne LeDoux (Adele Jergens, looking properly electric), but she’s having an affair with Purvis, who’s planning to run away with her to Mexico as soon as the job is completed. The robbery happens but Benny is mortally wounded in a shoot-out with the cops and for much of the movie the tension is between Benny’s demand that his fellow crooks get him to a doctor and their refusal to stop or even slow down their flight to attend to their fallen comrade. Purvis finally puts Benny out of his misery with two well-aimed shots, and the crooks dump the car with Benny’s body in it into a nearby lake. Having donned gas masks and haz-mat suits to commit the robbery – part of their plot was to immobilize the armored car guards with gas – they drive through an oil field to reach a boat they have waiting for them to make their final getaway.

Only the cops, after briefly being as bamboozled as the robbers wanted them to be, finally figure it out and give chase. Ace Foster is killed by the police and Al Mapes gets arrested and rats out the locations of Purvis, Yvonne and the loot. Actually the cops had figured it out earlier because Purvis had told everybody in the gang not to write anything down, but to memorize all the contact information. Alas, Benny had not only written down Purvis’s L.A. address and phone numbers, he’d done so on the back of a matchbook and put it in the band of his hat – and naturally the cops find the tell-tale matchbook on the premises of Purvis’s L.A. redoubt. There’s a reasonably exciting chase scene that’s unusual for 1950 in that it takes place at an airport and involves the attempts of Purvis and LeDoux to get the pilot of the plane they’ve rented to take off without any interference from the ground and air traffic controllers trying to get the plane to hold still long enough for the police to arrest them. The pilot, whom Purvis is already holding at gunpoint to force him to ignore the controllers’ instructions, refuses to take off when a big commercial airliner coming in for a landing bears down on them. Purvis gets out of the plane and attempts to flee on foot with the suitcase containing the loot, but ultimately the airliner literally crashes into him and kills him. As he falls, the suitcase flies open and the bills for which several people have already died spill out everywhere – an ending Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson would later copy, much more effectively, for their big-caper film, The Killing (1956). In The Film Noir Encyclopedia, Robert Porfirio is far kinder to Armored Car Robbery than it deserves. He writes, “Armored Car Robbery does possess the noir visual style of many RKO crime and suspense films in the post-Welles era.” No, it doesn’t; cinematographer Guy Roe gets almost none of the classic noir look into it, and in the end it’s just another mediocre movie sucking off the bones of a great one that just happened to be filmed at the same time.

A Sailor-Made Man (Hal Roach Productions, Pathé, 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube stream of the 1921 Harold Lloyd comedy A Sailor-Made Man – the title was a pun on A Tailor-Made Man, a hit Broadway play by Harry James Smith first staged in 1917 and derived from Hungarian and German antecedents, but A Tailor-Made Man would not be filmed until a year after A Sailor-Made Man. Though most of the leading male comedians of the silent-film era played relatively recognizable and stable class identities – Charlie Chaplin the lower-class “Tramp,” Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle the working-class joe, Harold Lloyd the middle-class striver and Buster Keaton the upper-class twit – sometimes they would cross over into each other’s territories. In this case Lloyd is playing in Keaton’s usual territory as “The Boy,” a spoiled rich kid who’s in futile love with “The Girl” (Mildred Davis, three years before she quit acting to become Mrs. Harold Lloyd for real). Unfortunately for “The Boy,” “The Girl”’s father can’t stand him and doesn’t want him as a son-in-law until he can make something of himself by actually getting and keeping a job. Accordingly “The Boy” joins the U.S. Navy. Then “The Girl”’s father invites all her friends, including “The Boy,” onto his yacht for an extended pleasure cruise – only “The Boy” can’t go because he’s stuck in the Navy until his three-year enlistment contract expires. At this point I was sure that “The Girl,” her father and her friends would be shipwrecked somewhere out in the middle of nowhere and “The Boy”’s ship would rescue them.

That’s not how Lloyd and his crew – director Fred Newmeyer (who would eventually leave Lloyd’s employ and make some of the ghastliest “B” movies ever made, most notoriously A Shriek in the Night, shot in 1935 but not released until 1943 because it was so God-awful) and writers Hal Roach (who also produced), Sam Taylor, Jean C. Havez and H. M. “Beanie” Walker (the last-named wrote the intertitles and was one of the few title writers who was able to make the transition to screenplays for the talkies, notably for Laurel and Hardy) – charted their course. After some relatively amusing by-play between Lloyd and his best buddy on the ship, “Rough-House” O’Rafferty (Noah Young), who start out as enemies but end up as friends after O’Rafferty admits to an officer that it was he who threw Lloyd’s box at him, the crew end up on shore leave at a fictitious [East] Indian or Middle Eastern kingdom called “Khairpura-Bhandanna.” The uncertainty of the location stems from the Indian “sound” of the name of the place but the decidedly Arab architecture – in fact I was wondering if the crew went over to Paramount studio to borrow the sets from the recently completed Rudolph Valentino blockbuster The Sheik. Khairpura-Bhandanna is ruled by a nasty, super-horny Maharajah (Dick Sutherland, later the villain in D. W. Griffith’s German-set and -shot Isn’t Life Wonderful?), and when “The Girl,” her father and her friends arrive there the Maharajah instantly falls head over heels in lust for “The Girl” and sends a crew to kidnap her and hold her hostage in his palace until she yields to his slimy advances. Fortunately, “The Boy”’s ship also docks in Khairpura-Bhandanna and the crew gets shore leave, whereupon by Lloyd’s usual combination of cunning, guile and sheer speed he is able to rescue her and get her out of the palace.

Like a lot of other silent comedies, A Sailor-Made Man is stronger in its parts than as a whole. Lloyd’s character is introduced on board ship dressed in a natty white officer’s uniform, and everyone salutes him. Just when we were wondering, “How did he ever get to be an officer?,” the camera pulls back and we realize … it was all a dream, and the “woman” who was nuzzling his neck in the dream sequence turns out to be a monkey. Later the monkey turns up again in a scene in which O’Rafferty is trying to shave, only he accidentally knocks out the glass containing his shaving mirror, the monkey turns up in the frame instead, and O’Rafferty wonders just how he ended up looking like that. (It’s nice that Harold Lloyd didn’t monopolize all the laughs in his films and let his supporting players get a few, too.) There’s also a scene in which Lloyd takes on the ship’s champion boxer, and – thanks to a timely bar of soap on which the champion slips and falls – he wins. That sets up a later scene in which he and O’Rafferty are attacked by eight ruffians on the streets of Khairpura-Bhandanna; O’Rafferty knocks all eight of them out in turn but, by collecting their supine bodies, Lloyd racks up four and once again he’s hailed as a hero. And there’s a clever finale in which Lloyd’s ship is across the harbor from “The Girl”’s father’s yacht and Lloyd uses semaphore signals to propose to her. “I will,” she answers back.

A Sailor-Made Man runs 46 minutes, on the cusp between a short and a feature, and according to its Wikipedia page it was originally intended as just another Harold Lloyd two-reeler. It seems that Hal Roach’s practice was to shoot way more footage than needed for two reels (about 20 to 25 minutes’ running time), preview the film and then edit out the parts that got either no or very few audience laughs. Only this time the preview audiences thought so much of the film was funny that Roach and Lloyd decided to keep everything in and release it as a short feature. This was at a time in the movie business when producers and studios didn’t think a comedian could sustain audience interest long enough to merit a feature. That changed in 1918, when Mack Sennett produced a feature-length movie called Mickey which starred his sometimes girlfriend Mabel Normand as a miner’s daughter. After a troubled production history – Mickey went through four directors and the one who finally finished it, F. Richard “Dick” Jones, literally held the negative hostage until he and Sennett settled a pay dispute – the film became a blockbuster hit, surpassed in gross earnings during the silent era only by The Birth of a Nation and The Big Parade.

Then every silent comedian wanted to make features. Charlie Chaplin made The Kid with the young Jackie Coogan in 1920 (a brilliant film, though Chaplin weakened it when he prepared it for reissue in the 1970’s and slashed it to ribbons; if you can find a public-domain DVD of the 1920 original, you’re in luck!). Buster Keaton made The Three Ages in 1922 (though because the film had three separate story lines – it was a parody of D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance, which had four – he was playing it cautiously and figured he could divide it into three two-reelers if it didn’t work as a feature) and Our Hospitality in 1923. Lloyd used A Sailor-Made Man to edge into feature production until he could make his first film actually planned as a full-length movie, Grandma’s Boy, a year later. And Hal Roach would return to the 45-minute movie length in 1940 when he started shooting what he called “streamliners” (the word “streamline” had the same sort of marketing cachet in the 1940’s that “high-tech” did in the 1990’s), four-reel films that Roach felt would bridge the gap between shorts and features. Unfortunately, Roach’s “streamliners” didn’t find the audience he was expecting, either in the early 1940’s or at the end of the decade when he decided to make them all in color at a time when color comedies were still a relative rarity.

My Life Is Murder: "Fake Empire" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, July 5) I watched a delightful episode of the Australian policier My Life Is Murder in which heroine Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless), a recently resigned Melbourne Police Department detective who’s given a cold case to investigate by her former police partner, detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry), is confronted by professional psychic Chloe Angel (Jane Harber) over a case in which a young-ish man was stabbed in the back and killed by an intruder in his home. The victim was Steven Harborne (Brian Brochmann), whom Chloe claims to be in contact with from the Great Beyond. She tells Alexa to tell Steven’s girlfriend, Jasmine Harris (Adrienne Pickering), that Steven was having an affair with a mystery partner. Steven had formerly taken nude photos of Jasmine right after they made love, but he’d stopped doing that and instead he was taking nude pictures of the woman with whom he’d been having extra-relational activities. Alexa finds Steven’s photos on the hard drive of his laptop, but he never showed his paramour’s face. Instead the sole distinguishing mark was a tattoo on the lower right end of her back, an unusual design of a bunch of flowers with a base made to look like the end of a lightbulb that fits into a standard socket. So Alexa has to try as best she can to sneak peeks of all Steven’s female acquaintances to see if they have that tattoo.

At first she thinks Chloe herself might have been Steven’s lover, but her back has no tattoo. Ultimately she traces it to the tattoo artist and between that and the visual evidence on her back, Alexa realizes that Steven’s extra-relational partner was Abby Williams (Danielle Horvath), a co-worker of Jasmine’s at a local hospital where they were both nurses. A third co-worker is a rather creepy male nurse named Adam Jaber (Hazem Shammas), who from the moment he turned up – tall, dark-haired, rather sketchy-looking – I suspected he’d turn out to be up to no good and possibly Steven’s real killer. That’s exactly what happened, though as the show lurched to a climax and Chloe promised to reveal the killer’s identity at her live appearance at a local theatre (where tickets had barely been selling until she got publicly involved in Steven’s case, whereupon the house sold out and she had to add two more shows to accommodate everyone who wanted to see her), writer Paul Bennett briefly tried to throw us a red herring by hinting that Jasmine had actually found out about Steven’s affair and killed him out of jealousy. (We see Steven actually get stabbed by a figure wearing a blue hoodie, the producers apparently copying Lifetime’s current gimmick of having its killers wear hoodies so it’s not immediately apparent what gender they are.) Only it turns out that Chloe exposes Adam as the killer after all, especially since Adam tried to take Chloe out while she was doing her day job as a groundskeeper at a city park by stabbing her with an EpiPen, so she would collapse and die while no one would suspect she was poisoned because her tox screen would turn up negative. (Bennett explained this by saying that epinephrine, which is what an EpiPen delivers, is a normal chemical in the human body.)

Not surprisingly, Adam’s motive was unrequited love for Jasmine, though much to his horror Jasmine remained loyal to Steven even after he died and then was exposed as a polyamorist. She even threw a memorial party for him! Mixed in with the story is Alexa’s acute skepticism towards all forms of psychic phenomena and specifically the people who claim to be able to speak with the dead. Alexa’s friend and associate Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans) argues with her about it and insists there is something out there beyond our knowledge of the physical world. Bennett also couldn’t resist the hint towards the end that Chloe has some real psychic power even though Alexa says that what alleged mediums do is simply ask leading questions – which Madison replies is exactly what Alexa does as an investigator, “Sure,” Alexa replies, “but I don’t claim to be able to talk to dead people.” At the end, after Hussey and a couple of uniformed cops have taken Adam into custody for Steven’s murder, Alexa references her late husband and the watch he gave her, which she still wears, which he had inscribed. “How did she know about the inscription?” Alexa asks about Chloe – though I would have expected Alexa to respond, “Because she went to see the jeweler and asked about it.”