A Gun In His Hand (MGM "Crime Does Not Pay" Series, 1945)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 14) I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies: a Crime Does Not Pay short called A Gun In His Hand (1945) and a feature, A Lady Without Passport. Despite its generic “crime-y” title, A Gun In His Hand actually turned out to be quite good and highly unusual. Written by Richard H. Landau (an “original” story credit that for once seems genuinely original) and Charles F. Royal (screenplay), and directed by the up-and-coming Joseph Losey (who had a meteoric rise to major directorial jobs in features and an equally meteoric fall due to the Hollywood blacklist, though he salvaged his career by moving to Britain and making some great films, including The Servant and Accident, there), A Gun In His Hand is about a career criminal, Dennis Nordell (Tom Trout, who judging from his performance here should have had much more of a career than he did), who applies to the local police department in his mid-sized Midwestern city. His intent is to learn police tactics from the inside and thereby figure out how to avoid detection when he and his gang actually commit crimes. He and his assistant Frankie (Anthony Caruso) pull off a series of meticulously planned robberies of liquor warehouses (one wonders how they sell the stuff after they’ve stolen it, but in a 20-minute running time we don’t have much time to think about that). In order to evade detection they first show up at a nearby warehouse and trip its burglar alarm, thereby distracting the (honest) cops on duty in the neighborhood and keeping them away from the real target. Police Inspector Dana (Richard Gaines) tries a variety of tactics, including switching the system by which patrol officers are assigned to their beats, to stop the robberies, but to no avail.

Then one cop, McGuinnes [sic] – played by, who else, Robert Emmet O’Connor (this is one of those movies from classic Hollywood which makes it seem like all police officers are Irish) – figures it out and not only goes to the right warehouse but catches Nordell in action as part of the gang. Nordell shoots and kills him, and Dana, who’s become convinced that the robbers have inside help from a corrupt officer but has no idea who the officer might be, orders all his cops to turn in their weapons for ballistic checks against the bullet that killed McGuinnes. Nordell had planned ahead for such an eventuality by swapping out his police-issued revolver for another gun, with which he’d shot McGuinnes, and in order to avoid being found out he hits on the idea of framing a street criminal with a long record, Calvin “Whitey” Foster (Arthur Space), for the crime. He plants the murder weapon in Whitey’s room and fakes a set of fingerprints taken from Whitey’s prison record. Only Nordell is found out when the real Whitey is arrested – and shows that he couldn’t have possibly left the fingerprints on the gun because since those prints were taken, he’d suffered an industrial accident in the prison’s jute mill and lost the middle finger on one hand. (My husband Charles read the above and said that when he was growing up in Florida he’d seen so many grownups with missing fingers from mill accidents he didn’t realize for years that virtually all adult men had 10 fingers.) Dana thereby arrests Nordell and he is subsequently executed. I wonder if MGM and the Crime Does Not Pay producer, Chester Franklin, got the idea of having a crook sneak onto the police force from the film A Scandal in Paris, which was being made independently at the same time and starred George Sanders as Lecocq, a real-life French criminal who became the founding chief of the Surété, or if the two groups of filmmakers hit on the idea independently, but be that as it may, A Gun In His Hand is a nice bit of short filmmaking and a cut above most of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts in its sheer audacity as well as the power of Losey’s direction.

A Lady Without Passport (MGM, 1950)

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

Unfortunately, the next film Turner Classic Movies showed, A Lady Without Passport, was pretty dreary and boring. It was shown as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” even though it’s not really thematically or visually noir. It was also an MGM production, and this time the producer, Samuel Marx (MGM’s former story editor during Irving Thalberg’s lifetime and not a relative of the Marx Brothers, though the Marx Brothers’ father was also named Samuel), hired Joseph H. Lewis as director on the strength of his immediately previous film, the 1949 film noir masterpiece Gun Crazy. Marx also hired MGM’s former contract star, Hedy Lamarr, to return to the studio following the success of her most recent film, Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949). He had to pay her $150,000, a whopping increase over what she’d been making until 1945, when MGM fired her. Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria on November 9, 1914 and as a teenager she appeared in several German films, most notoriously in Ecstasy (1933), directed by Gustav Machaty. (Since Machaty was Czech, this is routinely referred to as a Czech film even though it wasn’t; it was made in Munich and, though there is virtually no dialogue, what there is of it is definitely in German.) Machaty tricked young Hedy into appearing nude in various scenes, pointing out that the camera would be far away from her and telling her she’d only be seen dimly in the background. His trick was to use a telephoto lens, a piece of equipment Hedy had never heard of, and she didn’t realize what he’d done until she took her parents to see the film – and there her naked body was in vivid closeup splashed bigger than life across the screen.

Hedy later married German munitions maker Fritz Mandl, who regularly took her to big Nazi functions in hopes that her sheer beauty would encourage Nazi officials to place large orders with his firm. When Hedy got tired of being Mrs. Fritz Mandl and getting dragged to these parties, she divorced him in 1937, just as MGM head Louis B. Mayer was touring Europe looking for beautiful young women he could sign to film contracts. Though he was more than a little anxious about Hedy’s past, particularly her infamous nude scenes in Ecstasy, Mayer signed her anyway and renamed her “Hedy Lamarr” after Barbara La Marr, an actress he’d worked with in silent days. Alas, when Lamarr showed up to Hollywood Mayer didn’t have a movie in mind for her – he wanted her to make I Take This Woman with Spencer Tracy as a doctor torn between his desire to help the poor and the demands of his rich, spoiled wife, but the script wasn’t ready and ultimately the movie took three years to make and cycled through four directors. Instead Mayer loaned her to United Artists producer Walter Wanger, who put her in Algiers, his remake of the French film Pépé le Moko. She became an instant sensation because audiences were so struck by her beauty they either didn’t notice or didn’t care that as an actress she sucked. Lamarr turned down a number of great films, including Casablanca and Gaslight (both of which went to Ingrid Bergman, who was just as beautiful as Lamarr and could act) as well as Laura (though Lamarr defended her decision on the last one, saying years later that it was a terrible movie redeemed only by David Raksin’s great song; she said, “If only they’d sent me the sheet music with the script!”).

Instead she made a ponderous Gaslight knockoff called Experiment Perilous with George Brent at RKO, and after MGM let her go she made equally dreary movies like The Strange Woman, Dishonored Lady and Let’s Love a Little. Getting cast as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epic Samson and Delilah seemed like a major boost to her career (though it had its detractors; referencing her and Victor Mature, who played Samson, Groucho Marx joked, “I never go see movies in which the man’s tits are bigger than the woman’s”), but A Lady Without Passport was a commercial flop and another dreary movie that allowed Lamarr to coast on her looks and didn’t require any acting skills. It’s essentially Casablanca lite; male lead Peter Carzcag (John Hodiak) is a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agent sent to Cuba to bust a human trafficking ring led by nightclub owner Palinov (George Macready, who out-acts just about everybody else in the film). Palinov has a private plane with which he smuggles undocumented immigrants from Cuba to the U.S., landing them on a secret airstrip in Florida. Peter poses as Hungarian refugee “Josef Gombush” in order to get inside Palinov’s operation, and what follows is about 80 minutes of ponderous “intrigue” in which Peter falls in love with Marianne Lorress (Hedy Lamarr), a woman of mystery – the Wikipedia page on the film says she was fleeing a concentration camp but I don’t remember that being at all clear in the film itself – who’s desperate to make it to the U.S. because her father (whom we never see) has already established himself here, though later she admits that he’s undocumented, too. Palinov is willing to help Marianne even though she has no money, because there’s another way she can pay him … and Peter has a jealous hissy-fit that she’s willing to have sex with him for the chance to emigrate.

It ends with a series of surprisingly dull chase sequences, in one of which Palinov’s plane is chased by an INS plane and forced to crash-land, followed by another chase through the Everglades. According to Wikipedia, this scene was originally supposed to take place in a hotel, but since the film was shot almost entirely on location in Florida and Cuba, that would have required finding a disused one. They couldn’t, so producer Marx ordered that the final confrontation be moved to the Everglades in a scene strikingly reminiscent of the ending of Lewis’s immediately previous film, Gun Crazy. Alas, the comparison only makes A Lady Without Passport seem even worse! There’s also something of Key Largo in the climax, as Peter is stuck on a boat with Palinov and Marianne and deliberately sabotages Palinov’s escape plans by switching the boat’s fuel tanks from one that’s full to one that’s empty, then when Palinov demands that Peter throw his gun in the water, Peter throws in the lever controlling the fuel tanks (which he’s previously removed) instead. Ultimately Palinov makes his escape, or tries to, though we don’t see him get either captured or killed. We just hear Peter tell Marianne that he won’t get far, a disappointing ending to a disappointing movie. In his “Noir Alley” outro, Eddie Muller praised Joseph H. Lewis’s direction and Paul Vogel’s cinematography, saying that Lewis almost invariably placed the camera where it should have been and cut effectively, but this is the Joseph H. Lewis who’d become known as “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because he had a whole collection of wagon wheels he’d put in the foreground when he shot “B” Westerns and wanted to add some visual flair to enliven otherwise dull dialogue scenes.

Here the dull script by Lawrence Taylor (story), Cyril Hume (“adaptation”) and Howard Dimsdale (script) sorely taxed Lewis’s visual skills and gave us a boring movie with only a few bits of actual film noir occasionally livening things up. If the writing committee had made Marianne an outright femme fatale assigned by Palinov to lure Peter into the plot and ultimately either compromise or actually kill him, A Lady Without Passport would have been a considerably better and certainly more entertaining film than it is. One wonders why Hedy Lamarr wasn’t able to apply her intelligence to becoming a good actor, since she was hardly your stereotypical “dumb” sexy female movie star. In 1942 she and French émigré composer George Antheil teamed up in Hollywood to invent something called “frequency hopping spread spectrum,” defined on the TechTarget Web site (https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/frequency-hopping-spread-spectrum) as “the repeated switching of the carrier frequency during radio transmission to reduce interference and avoid interception.” Their idea was to make it impossible for enemy ships to jam the guidance systems of Allied torpedoes. The U.S. Navy decided during the war that the system was too complicated to bother with, but after World War II they adopted it but had their engineers “tweak” the system enough to avoid infringing on the Lamarr/Antheil patent. Though frequency hopping became the basis of cell-phone technology, Lamarr didn’t get credit for her role in inventing it until 1997 – three years before her death – when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) finally gave her an award for it. She never made a penny from an invention whose current estimated value is $30 billion, and her reaction to the EFF award was, “It’s about time.”

Sweet Music (Warner Bros., 1935)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 8) there were a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies I wanted to watch, a 1935 Warner Bros. production called Sweet Music and a 1921 Goldwyn Pictures silent called The Ace of Hearts. Sweet Music was actually a vehicle concocted for inexplicably popular radio singing star Rudy Vallée, and though its director, Alfred E. Green, was a decently talented hack, it’s definitely a Schreiber rather than an auteur movie and the Schreiber is Jerry Wald. Wald wrote the original story and collaborated with Carl Erickson and Warren Duff on the script, which is an appealing fusion of musical and screwball comedy. Vallee plays egomaniacal bandleader Skip Houston, whose rather nasal-voiced singing and the not particularly amusing antics of his band have somehow made him an enormous radio star. As the film opens he’s performing a university gala (for some reason Vallée’s real-life popularity was particularly strong among college audiences; he made a specialty out of recording college songs and in the opening sequence his band is shown performing in front of a backdrop festooned with college pennants). The opening shot is of a neon-lit silhouette of a trombone, like Busby Berkeley’s famous neon violins in the “Shadow Waltz” sequence from Gold Diggers of 1933, and the trombone player turns out to be a member of a real-life aggregation called The Frank and Milton Britton Comedy Band. Milton’s real last name was Levy and Frank’s was Wenzel – they weren’t really brothers but posed as such – and like Spike Jones they formed a band that played “straight” jazz for a number or two and then did slapstick antics. The Wikipedia page on them says they played trombone and cornet, but doesn’t specify which played which. Whichever Britton played trombone really goes to town on this, including doing a remarkably good airplane impression.

The band’s next gig is in Chicago, where Skip publicly insults dancer Bonnie Haydon (Ann Dvorak), who’s under contract to the theatre where they’re performing and so Skip has to put up with her horning in on his act. The two trade insults in front of the audience, and she gives as good as she gets. They get an offer to come to New York to appear in the Frolics, arranged by Bonnie’s manager “Ten Percent” Nelson (Ned Sparks), but they only last one performance before the show is closed down. Skip’s agent Barney Cowan (Allen Jenkins) arranges for him to do a radio show sponsored by Selzer’s Cigars, owned by two Jewish brothers named Sidney and Sigmund Selzer. The Selzers are played by Joseph Cawthorn and Al Shean; Cawthorn is just another character actor but Shean is a major figure in American comedy. He was not only a vaudeville star in his own right as part of the comedy team of Gallagher and Shean – though he was really Jewish and his birth last name was Schönberg, like the composer – he was also the uncle of the Marx Brothers and their first writer. The Marx Brothers never actually decided that Harpo should be mute; Shean just gave him fewer and fewer lines every time he rewrote the act, until in one version Harpo was down to just three lines. On opening night a critic reviewed that act, praised Harpo’s pantomime but wrote, “The effect is spoiled when he speaks.” The next day, Shean cut Harpo’s three lines and Harpo never again spoke on stage. The Selzers grimly tolerate Bonnie’s performances until they get so many letters complaining how terrible she is and demanding she be fired that they give her the ax. Skip wants her to stay on – by now their initial hatred has blossomed into love and he’s not only dating her but wants to marry her – but Cowan hits on the idea of softening the blow by telling Bonnie that Skip is in love with someone else and wants her on the program instead.

The someone else is Helen Morgan, playing herself and singing a rather gloomy song called “I See Two Lovers,” and she’s relentlessly photographed by James Van Trees to look as ugly as possible. Morgan was 11 years older than Ann Dvorak and looks even older than that – she could easily have been Dvorak’s mother – and we get the impression that if Skip had really jilted Bonnie for Morgan he’d be trading down big-time. Helen Morgan made two genuinely great films, Applause (1929) and Show Boat (1936), but there she was not only featured but had great directors (Rouben Mamoulian and James Whale, respectively). In Show Boat, which TCM showed just before Sweet Music, Whale and cinematographer John Mescall made Morgan look younger than she had in her previous films like Marie Galante and Sweet Music, and she’d responded with a great performance, but here she just sings one song in her highly dated lugubrious “torch” style at a time when more sensitive and musicianly singers like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Judy Garland were obliterating that approach to music. Meanwhile Skip is getting gloomy because his contract with the Selzers forces him to continue the program even though Bonnie has been fired. As one of his crazy publicity stunts Barney Cowan hits on the idea of hiring Lulu Betts (Alice White, who’d been a semi-major name in Warner Bros. musicals in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s but had tumbled down the ladder into dumb-blonde character roles) to jump in a lake – literally – and pose as an abandoned ex-girlfriend of Skip’s attempting suicide out of unrequited love for him. The plot backfires when Lulu’s gangster brother “Dopey” Malone (Robert Armstrong, once again ill-used; one would have thought his star turns in King Kong and its sequel Son of Kong would have made him a major star, but no-o-o-o-o) holds a gun to Skip’s head and announces he’s going to make him marry her – though he’s talked out of it and Lulu marries Barney instead.

With Bonnie, Lulu, Barney and Nelson all out of work in New York, Barney hits on the idea of the four of them doing a radio comedy program called The Happy Family that turns inexplicably popular. Given their choice of sponsors, the revenge-minded Bonnie picks Selzers Cigars, and the show is a success until Barney cooks one of his stupid publicity stunts that goes horrendously wrong. His idea is to have “Dopey” stage a fake kidnapping of his radio-star sister, but instead “Dopey” punches Barney in the mouth and Barney is unable to work for three months. Ultimately it all ends happily, with Skip and Bonnie reuniting for a big benefit show in which they do the big number they were supposed to do in the Frolics (ya remember the Frolics?), after which Skip plans to take a job at the (real) Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood and proposes to Bonnie on condition that she give up her show-business ambitions and be just a wife and mother. Despite the annoying sexism of the ending – of course I’d much rather have seen them become a professional and personal couple, with them trading Burns-and-Allen-style insults as part of their act – the song that sends them off is “Fare Thee Well, Annabelle,” one of my favorites, which I first heard from The Boswell Sisters in their incandescent recording from London on July 19, 1935 (available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofLhZ7Qm5SE).

Overall Sweet Music is a really fun film, and for all the unattractiveness James Van Trees gives to Helen Morgan, I give him a lot of credit for reviving the iris-out, a charming visual effect that was a basic transition device in the silent era but pretty much disappeared once sound came in. Though it might have been an even better film with Preston Sturges directing (Sturges actually cast Vallée in some of his Paramount comedies and found genuine acting skill in him) and/or with Warners’ other male singing star, Dick Powell, playing the lead (though Powell’s singing style is almost as dated as Vallée’s, he was a much better actor even before his remarkable transition from musicals to films noir with his incredible performance as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet), Sweet Music is quite good as it stands. One thing it captures quite ably is Rudy Vallée’s notorious egomania; when he was working in New York on the 1929 Paramount film Glorifying the American Girl, he gave autographed photos of himself to all the crew members. He’d made himself so obnoxious to them that they responded by posting the photos in the studio urinals, so they could literally piss on Rudy Vallée (or at least on his image)!

The Ace of Hearts (Goldwyn, 1921)

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

After Sweet Music TCM put on “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart for a pair of films that represented romantic triangles, though that was about all they had in common. The second one was The Patsy, a 1928 comedy starring Marion Davies that I’d already posted on in 2016 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-patsy-mgm-1928.html) and 2021 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-patsy-mgm-1928.html) in which the triangle was two women – Pat Harrington (Davies) and her sister Grace (Jane Winton) – and one man, aspiring real-estate developer Tony Anderson (Orville Caldwell). The first one was a considerably darker film, The Ace of Hearts, from the Goldwyn Company in 1921, in which the love triangle was two men and one woman. The Ace of Hearts was an attempt to reproduce the success of the 1920 film The Penalty by re-teaming the principal three creative people involved: director Wallace Worsley, writer Gouverneur Morris (a direct descendant of the original Gouverneur Morris who was a signatory to the U.S. Constitution) and star Lon Chaney, Sr. This time Morris concocted a tale of a secret society of anarchists who first mark certain individuals for death and then carry out the killings. The society has an elaborate set of rituals in which they first debate whether the intended victim deserves to be eliminated and then deal a set of playing cards, with whoever gets the ace of hearts being charged with carrying out the murder.

There are between seven and nine members of the club, but the key characters are Farralone (Lon Chaney), Forrest (John Bowers) and the sole female, Lilith (Leatrice Joy), whom they both love even though she disdains any interest in men, love or sex because of her devotion to “The Cause.” (Morris carefully avoids any explanation of what “The Cause” is or why these people consider it so important.) The opening scene shows the members of the secret society debating whether their latest designated victim really deserves killing, and judging from how he’s described in the film’s titles – an older rich man, influential in New York society, who’s growing increasingly egomaniacal and oppressive – he sounds an awful lot like a prototype of Donald Trump. At least two members of the club, including Forrest, have been stalking the intended victim for three weeks; Forrest has been working as a waiter at the restaurant where the victim always has breakfast at precisely 7 a.m. Forrest draws the ace of hearts on the third go-round (if no one gets the ace of hearts on the first deal, they just keep dealing until someone turns up with the death card), and he’s outfitted with an ingenious bomb concealed in some sort of package with a dial concealed in its fastener that, once turned to the left, sets off a bomb which will explode five minutes later. Only Forrest has an attack of conscience; he demands that Lilith marry him the day before he’s scheduled to carry out the assassination. He’s already taken out a marriage license for them, and she agrees. After they spend the night together – with the lovelorn Farallone hanging outside their apartment building all night with only a stray dog for company – he has the proverbial second thoughts. She does, too, but eventually Forrest shows up at the restaurant at the designated time for the murder.

The intended victim upbraids him for refusing to wait for him to read the menu and give him his order – thereby letting us in the audience know he’s as much of an asshole as we’ve been told he was by the gang who want to kill him. But just then Forrest sees a young couple who’ve got married secretly because her parents don’t approve of him, and identifying himself and Lilith with them, he decides he can’t go through with the assassination because the bomb will blow up the whole restaurant and kill the nice young lovers, too. (One would have thought the mad scientist who cooked up the murder bomb could instead have invented something that would conceal a poisoned needle, so only the intended victim would have been killed and everyone else would have been spared.) Earlier there’d been a scene in which Forrest and Farralone jostled each other in the street, and I had briefly wondered if Farralone had sensed that Forrest wasn’t willing to go through with the killing and had pickpocketed the murder weapon intending to use it himself, but no-o-o-o-o. Instead Forrest and Lilith take a train going west, while the remaining seven members of the circle debate who will assassinate Forrest and Lilith for their treachery against the group. Farralone draws the ace of hearts, only his plan is to take the murder bomb and explode it at the group’s meeting, killing all of them and eliminating them as a threat to the established order. Watching Forrest and Lilith has convinced Farralone that only love and compassion, not violence and death, can be the basis of a new and better world order. When the police find the wreckage of the anarchists’ headquarters, they discover Farralone’s body, still clutching the ace of hearts.

When Jacqueline Stewart announced the movie, my husband Charles wondered if it had been inspired by G. K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), though the two stories have nothing in common except that both center around a secret society of anarchists (and in Chesterton’s novel all the supposed anarchists turn out to be police detectives infiltrating the group undercover). The Ace of Hearts is a good movie but also a frustrating one, due in large measure to Wallace Worsley’s direction. The directors this movie really needed were all still working in Germany: Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene (director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which Goldwyn Pictures distributed in the U.S.), F. W. Murnau or Paul Leni. Any one of them could have given this film the nightmarish mise-en-scène it truly needed; though Worsley had worked with Lon Chaney before in The Penalty and afterwards would direct him in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, his treatment of this wild story is all too tame. It also doesn’t help that Chaney doesn’t get to do one of his fabled character make-ups (as he’d done in The Penalty, in which he played a cripple with no legs), and he looks oddly stockier and heavier-set than he would five years later in Tell It to the Marines (about which I’ve joked that Chaney essentially made a John Wayne movie well before John Wayne did!), my reference point for what Lon Chaney looked like out of makeup. Charles also wondered just when The Ace of Hearts was supposed to be taking place: he asked if audiences of the time read it as a contemporary story or as one taking place 20 or 30 years earlier, when anarchist assassins were very much “in the news” and among their most prominent victims were President William McKinley, Russian Czar Alexander II and Italian King Umberto Emmanuel. The Ace of Hearts isn’t a bad movie; it’s just not as good as it could have been, and John Bowers and Leatrice Joy aren’t especially strong as the romantic leads, though they’re serviceable and get the job done.

Cabaret (Allied Artists Pictures, ABC Pictures, Feuer-Martin Productions, 1972)

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

Last night at 6:45 p.m. I turned on Turner Classic Movies for the second of a two-film tribute to Liza Minnelli. The first film was Arthur, which my husband Charles and I watched ages ago on a VHS tape I’d made from TCM, and by chance we watched it the night after we’d seen the 1931 film Sidewalks of New York, which had basically the same plot: an hereditarily rich kid (Buster Keaton in Sidewalks, Dudley Moore in Arthur) lives a socially irresponsible existence and is bailed out of his womanizing and alcoholism by his butler (Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards in Sidewalks, John Gielgud in Arthur). The big difference is that Sidewalks was made on the cusp of Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidency and Arthur on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s, and the Zeitgeist difference was symbolized by the fact that the moral redemption of Keaton’s character is depicted by him doing something socially responsible with his fortune (opening a recreational center for at-risk youths), while Moore’s character does no such thing. The second film with Liza Minnelli TCM showed last night was her star-making role as Sally Bowles in the 1972 musical Cabaret, the screen adaptation of the Joe Masterson/Howard Kander/Fred Ebb musical based on I Am a Camera, John Van Druten’s play based on Christopher Isherwood’s stories of his early adulthood in late Weimar-era Berlin, which he left and returned to England just as the Nazis were coming to power. The film was scripted by Jay Presson Allen (also the writer Alfred Hitchcock brought onto Marnie after he decided he needed a woman to write for the title character) and stunningly directed by Bob Fosse. It’s the second of Fosse’s five films as full director – though before that he’d done musical numbers for other movies, including Damn Yankees, in which he directed his wife, Gwen Verdon, in her stunning “Whatever Lola Wants” number. (I remember watching Damn Yankees with my then-girlfriend Cat Ortiz, and she heard Verdon sing the song in her rather scratchy voice and wondered, “Why did she ever get cast in this movie?” Then she did her dance, and Cat said, “That’s why.”)

All five of Fosse’s movies – Sweet Charity (a musical version of Federico Fellini’s film Nights of Cabiria in which Fosse was forced to cast Shirley MacLaine as star instead of Verdon, who’d played the part on stage), Cabaret, Lenny, the overrated All That Jazz and the highly underrated Star 80 – are about the sordid underbelly of the entertainment industry and the struggle of people to make it into stardom. I hadn’t seen Cabaret in many years and I’d forgotten how good it is and how beautifully Fosse and Allen balanced the multiple elements of the story. Sally Bowles is the featured performer at the Kit Kat Klub, a cabaret in downtown Berlin in the early 1930’s, and she’s desperately trying to land a part in the movie industry and is willing to sleep with whomever she has to in order to do it. The film’s script name-checks Lya de Putti, a major star in the German film industry at the time (in 1926 she starred in an adaptation of Manon Lescaut in which an even more legendary star, Marlene Dietrich, had a supporting role as an up-and-comer). By chance I saw Cabaret for the first time in its initial release at the same time I first saw Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, a film about the Weimar-era German cabaret scene made while it was still going on and the movie that made Dietrich a star, and in my head the two films have been linked ever since. The plot starts when a young British man named Brian Roberts (Michael York), playing the character Isherwood based on himself, comes to Berlin to work as an English-as-a-second-language teacher to German students. (Ironically, the male lead of The Blue Angel, Emil Jannings, also played a character who worked as an ESL teacher in a German high school. Jannings was free to make The Blue Angel because, after promoting him as “The World’s Greatest Actor” and giving him four major films, Paramount in the U.S. had fired him because they didn’t think his strong German accent would work in English-language sound films. So I’ve long suspected there was a “So there!” aspect of Jannings having himself cast as an English teacher: “I do know how to speak English, damnit!”)

The sexually liberated Sally lends Brian her room for his English classes – his room in the same building is too small – and makes a pass at Brian, who rather shame-facedly explains that he’s never been sexually attracted to women, though he’s gone through the motions three times with mutually unsatisfying results. (This wasn’t the first time the young Michael York had played a Bisexual; he’d done so three years earlier in a marvelously kinky film called Something for Everyone, in which he ingratiates himself into a Swiss aristocratic family by sexually servicing both the mother and the Queer son – until the daughter takes over and demands that he marry her in an ending very much like the comeuppance Sammy Glick gets at the end of Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?) Eventually Sally does manage to seduce Brian, though she also attracts the attention of a young, hunky German aristocrat named Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem). Sally is singing Max’s praises to Brian and he says, “Screw Max!” “I do!,” says Sally – and Brian rather shame-facedly says, “So do I.” (The ABC TV network co-produced this film with Allied Artists, what was left of Monogram in the early 1970’s, but when they first showed this on TV they deleted this scene and all other references to Brian being Gay.) Also in the dramatis personae are hapless would-be gigolo Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper) and Jewish department-store heiress Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson), who meet at one of Brian’s English classes and are romantically attracted to each other, only their relationship founders not only on his concern that she and her parents will think he’s only after their money but because he’s a clandestine Jew himself. Ultimately he comes out to her as a Jew and they’re married in a synagogue on the eve of the Nazi takeover, and we find ourselves hoping that she and her family can get out of Germany in time to be spared the horrors of Nazi rule, including the Holocaust, and preferably with the Landauer fortune intact.

Fosse and Allen carefully keep the Nazi terror to the edges of the film, showing Nazi and Communist posters each vandalized by the other side, and in one scene Brian runs into two Nazi newsboys hawking the Völkischer Beobachter (the Nazi paper that was their main propaganda outlet before they took power), confronts them and gets beaten up for his pains. (We don’t get to see the actual beating, just his arm bandaged when he returns to Sally after the incident, in a welcome bit of Fossean understatement.) There’s also a chilling scene in which a crowd of Hitler Youth, led by a young man of almost unearthly beauty named Mark Lambert, sings a song called “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” as part of an impromptu Nazi street rally. He looks like he just stepped out of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will and the scene is an interesting and economical way of showing the Nazi menace without going overboard. Ultimately the Nazis take over Germany and the shows at the Kit Kat Klub continue, though without much of the satirical “edge” they’d had before (dramatized in the song “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,” in which the Kit Kat Klub MC – played by Joel Gray, the only member of the original Broadway cast who repeated their role on film – sings a love song to a woman dressed as an ape, and the punch line is, “If you could see her through my eyes/She wouldn’t look Jewish at all”). This is actually historically accurate; the Nazis allowed much of the German cabaret scene to continue, largely because their Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, realized (as his counterparts in the Soviet Union didn’t) that allowing the people to have innocuous light entertainment actually bolstered the regime because it was innocuous light entertainment and thereby gave the people an outlet for their discontents in ways that wouldn’t threaten the regime.

Bob Fosse made one decision about the film that in some ways strengthened the film and in other ways cheapened it: he decided that there would be no musical numbers except for the ones at the cabaret itself, when the singers in the cast (mostly Minnelli and Gray) would be performing as part of their act. Fosse said he didn’t like the obvious artificiality of people suddenly breaking into song and dance in scenes of ordinary life (ironically, two of the key people establishing that convention had been Liza Minnelli’s parents, director Vincente Minnelli and star Judy Garland, in their 1944 joint masterpiece Meet Me in St. Louis). The up side of this is that, ironically, it returned Cabaret to the style of the earliest movie musicals, which had all been about people who sang and danced for a living and showed them singing and dancing only when their characters were doing so professionally. The down side is that it vastly shrank the part of Sally’s and Brian’s landlady, Fräulein Schneider (Elizabeth Neumann-Viertel), who in the original stage version had been played by Lotte Lenya (Kurt Weill’s widow and a living link to the original German cabaret scene; she’d been a homeless woman working as a busker when Weill met her, got her jobs in cabarets, ultimately cast her as Lucy in The Threepenny Opera in its 1928 premiere and married her) and had had four songs, including “So What!” (which Liza Minnelli stunningly revived in a 1980’s PBS concert special) and “Married” (a remarkable song which I used in the mix CD I gave people who attended Charles’ and my wedding).

One of the most memorable things about Cabaret the movie is that it finally got Liza Minnelli out of the long shadow of Judy Garland and established her as a persona and an entertainer in her own right – though her two big numbers, “Maybe This Time” and the “Life Is a Cabaret” finale, do show her mom’s influence. It helped that Cabaret was a story that her mom neither could nor would have been able to do under the Production Code, and she won an Academy Award for it – though TCM host Ben Mankiewicz’s claim that Judy Garland never won an Oscar isn’t quite true: she won the juvenile Academy Award in 1940 for her performance in The Wizard of Oz. (The juvenile Oscar was two-thirds the size of the full one – 12 inches tall instead of 18 – and it was given for a few years in the late 1930’s after the explosive success of Shirley Temple had made child actors a hot property in Hollywood. Mickey Rooney had won it for Boys Town the year before, and the year of The Wizard of Oz Rooney was nominated for the full Academy Award for his performance opposite Garland in Babes in Arms.) One of the most interesting anecdotes about Cabaret is that when she signed for the role Liza Minnelli had planned to pattern her performance after Marlene Dietrich – until she talked it over with her dad, and he said, “There were other women entertainers in Germany besides Dietrich.” “Like who?” Liza said. “Louise Brooks,” Vincente Minnelli told his daughter – and when she saw the film Pandora’s Box, which started the American-born Brooks as the “earth spirit” and prototype femme fatale Lulu, Liza decided to base her Sally Bowles on Brooks and have her hair black and cut in the famous helmet-like Brooks bob.

One person who didn’t like the film Cabaret was, ironically, Christopher Isherwood, the author of the stories on which it had been based. He didn’t like the way the film intimated that his character would be straight at the end – Isherwood lived most of his life as a relatively open Gay man – and he also didn’t like the way Sally Bowles was portrayed. Isherwood’s model for the character had been a 19-year-old British girl named Jane Ross, who, he said, had been only a mediocre entertainer – yet here she was being portrayed by Liza Minnelli at the height of her powers. (I had a similar problem with the 1957 film Pal Joey, in which the male lead, Joey, was supposed to be a mediocre entertainer, but he was played by Frank Sinatra at the height of his powers.) Ironically, the basic story had been filmed before in 1955 as a non-musical called I Am a Camera, which my late home-care client and roommate John Primavera and I watched together on TV one night in the 1980’s for the first time. He’d been barred from seeing it on its initial release because he was still a boy and it had been restricted to adults only, and he’d been looking forward to it. Alas, both he and I found it terrible, especially since Sally Bowles was played by Julie Harris – who, like the late Heath Ledger, was only good at playing tortured introverts (as in Member of the Wedding, East of Eden and her one-woman show as Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst); she was as totally wrong for Sally Bowles as Liza Minnelli was triumphantly right!

The Phantom of 42nd Street (PRC, 1945)

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

Last night (Friday, September 6) my husband Charles and I managed to watch a rather interesting 1945 “B” movie from PRC, courtesy of a YouTube post: The Phantom of 42nd Street, a title which sounds like a mashup of The Phantom of the Opera and 42nd Street but which turned out to be the name of a decently accomplished vest-pocket mystery. It’s basically the old chestnut about the “jinxed” theatre and a number of murders taking place among people who used to work for it and/or produced plays there. The first murder victim is Jonathan Moore, a wealthy businessman who used to be financial manager for a repertoire (which the hero, played by Dave O’Brien, insists annoyingly on pronouncing “reper-twah”) company owned by his brother Cecil Moore (Alan Mowbray, turning in the kind of old-pro performance similar to Lionel Atwill’s in one of PRC’s best films, Lady in the Death House). Jonathan’s daughter Claudia (Kay Aldridge) has just made her theatrical debut in a play which is proclaimed as awful by just about all the New York critics, including the male lead, Tony Woolrich (Dave O’Brien) – did writers Milton Raison and Jack Harvey (the script was based on a novel they’d published jointly but Raison alone wrote the screenplay) deliberately name him after Alexander Woollcott? At least Tony had nice things to say about Claudia’s acting even though he wished she could have made her New York stage debut in a better play. It soon becomes apparent that he has a crush on her even though she’s more or less engaged to one of the other actors in her troupe, John Carraby (John Crawford). Two other people, including a watchman who used to be a sound tech for Cecil and Jonathan Moore, get murdered, and in all cases the killer leaves behind an insulting note referencing a part they played in one of the plays the Moore reper-twah company put on.

Jonathan Moore is murdered during the intermission of Claudia’s play and Tony’s typically irascible editor Peters (Milton Kibbee) chews him out for not having stayed there to report the crime so his paper, the New York Record, could have got the scoop. Tony teams up with his comic-relief sidekick, cabdriver Romeo (Frank Jenks) – whose real name was “Egbert” – and police lieutenant Walsh (Jack Mulhall, who’d come close to making the “A” list during the late silent era but whose career had nosedived with the advent of sound). Eventually they trace the murder back to Janis Buchanan (Edythe Elliott), who used to play female leads with the Moore reper-twah company and briefly was married to Cecil Moore, but they broke up and she ended up marrying someone else. Janis is actually Claudia Moore’s mother, though Claudia is ignorant of that fact (in most movies with this plot device, the ingénue knows who her mother is but the mystery is over who her father is!), and the killer turns out to be Janis’s estranged husband, though we never see him full face and neither imdb.com nor Wikipedia list the actor who plays him. (We only see him in long-shot with the typical black hooded costume, which was as de rigueur in 1930’s and early-1940’s mysteries as hoodies are in Lifetime films today!) The gimmick is that he went through plastic surgery so no one would recognize him (and presumably he spoke with a disguised voice as well and did such a good job of it no one recalled him aurally as well as visually!) and started knocking off the members of the cast and crew of Moore’s reper-twah company for reasons Raison and Harvey don’t make too clear.

Though the plot is pretty creaky – Charles was sure when I gave him the title that we’d seen it together before, though I suspect he was mixing it up with the 1929 film The Last Warning and its 1939 remake, The House of Fear (both considerably better movies about murders taking place in connection with the production of a play) – The Phantom of 42nd Street is actually a quite appealing movie, mainly because of a good cast. Dave O’Brien is personable, reasonably attractive and a far better personality than most of the PRC leading men (remember that this was towards the end of World War II and PRC had to compete both with the major studios and the U.S. military for the services of decent-looking young men!); Kay Aldridge is solidly professional and we can easily believe the nice things O’Brien’s character has to say about her acting; and Alan Mowbray provides a neat bit of solid old-pro professionalism to the cast. The director is Al Herman, whom “B”-movie historian Don Miller ridiculed – he particularly objected to the way he had characters break down a door: instead of moving on its hinges it fell forward – but The Phantom of 42nd Street doesn’t have any scenes in which characters break down doors and Herman therefore didn’t have any occasion to use his signature shot. Herman actually turns in a capable job of directing, getting the most out of a reasonably talented if hardly great cast (though Edythe Elliott brings more true pathos to her grande dame turned boarding-house keeper character than it needed), and Janis’s living space features some of the hideous wallpaper that was virtually a PRC trademark. Though The Phantom of 42nd Street is hardly one of PRC’s truly great films (there are only five, ironically all made by foreign-born directors: Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, Out of the Night and Detour, Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp and Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House), it’s a pleasant enough time-filler and quite accomplished professionally.

Lost Boundaries (Louis DeRochemont Associates, RD-DR Productions, Film Classics, 1949)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 5) my husband Charles and I watched a fascinating if uneven film on Turner Classic Movies: Lost Boundaries, the (mostly) true story of a light-skinned African-American doctor who “passed” for white, along with his equally light-skinned African-American wife, for two decades in a small New England town until he was “outed” when he applied to serve as a Navy doctor during World War II and Naval Intelligence discovered he’d joined a “Negro” fraternity in medical school and canceled his officer’s commission. Lost Boundaries was made in 1949 as an independent production by producer Louis de Rochemont and director Alfred Werker, which suggests it was a 20th Century-Fox production in exile. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, it was actually developed at MGM, but it was canceled at the last minute (ironically, MGM at the time was making their own movie about anti-Black prejudice, Intruder in the Dust, which I haven’t seen in decades but I remember as quite good). Lost Boundaries was based on an article by William H. White in the Reader’s Digest in 1947 about the real-life couple, Dr. Albert C. Johnston and his wife Thyra, who settled first in Gorham, New Hampshire and then in the neighboring town of Keene (called “Keenham” in the film) and lived and practiced there for 20 years until they were finally “outed” as Black. The film project went through the usual meat grinder, with a plethora of writers – Charles Palmer (“adaptation”), Eugene Ling and Virginia Shaler (screenplay), and Ormonde de Kay, Jr. and Maxime Furlaud (additional dialogue). For the film the names of the central characters were changed to “Dr. Scott Mason Carter” (Mel Ferrer) and his wife “Marcia” (Beatrice Pearson), and the story actually tracks pretty closely to Dr. and Mrs. Johnston’s real lives until Dr. Carter graduates from medical school and, unable to find a Black hospital in which he can serve his internship (in the film he gets thrown out of an internship at a Black hospital in Georgia when he’s told that a new policy has been enacted saying the internship can only go to a Southerner), does it in a white hospital in New England. He figures that for less than a year he can “pass” as white, finish his internship and then work as an openly Black doctor in hospitals serving the Black community.

But fate throws him a curveball; while visiting New Hampshire he gets an emergency call to rescue and revive someone who’s just been taken seriously ill off the coast. Dr. Carter’s patient turns out to be a doctor himself, Walter Brackett (Morton Stevens), who’s been looking for a doctor to take over his late father’s practice in Keenham. After Dr. Carter saves the younger Brackett’s life, he virtually demands that Dr. Carter remain in Keenham and take over his late father’s practice, which he does. Dr. Carter and Marcia have already had a child, a son they named Charles Howard Carter (played as a teenager by Richard Hylton) after Dr. Carter’s (Black) teacher in medical school (Emory Richardson). As they’re living in their white identities in Keenham, the Carters have another child, daughter Shelly (Susan Douglas), and both Howard and Shelly grow up and reach their teen years without any idea that they and their parents are really Black. In fact, Shelly is so white-identified she’s picked up the racist prejudices of the townspeople, and in one scene after her brother Howard announces he’s going to bring his (visibly) Black friend Arthur “Art” Cooper (William Greaves, a fine young Black actor and singer – he does one number, “Guess I’m Through with Love,” in a quite good Billy Eckstine-esque baritone), after Shelly’s white boyfriend Andy (Carleton Carpenter in his first film) does a song of his own – she protests that the neighbors will think ill of them when they have a “coon” over as a house guest. Dr. Carter is shocked to hear his daughter use a racist epithet, and he chews her out and forbids her to say it again but still doesn’t explain why. When the truth about their racial heritage comes out, the two Carter children are freaked out – especially Howard, who runs away from home, ends up in Harlem and gets arrested by New York police (including a Black detective, “Dixie” Thompson, played by Canada Lee) for trying to break up a knife fight between two young Black men living in the building where he’s rented an apartment. It’s only when they receive word of their son’s arrest that the Carters finally find out where he is.

The film ends with a service at the local Episcopal church where the Rev. John Taylor (played by a real minister, Rev. Robert A. Dunn) preaches a sermon about tolerance, equality and how all of us are the same in God’s eyes. Lost Boundaries is a quite impressive film even though there are times it seems to be trying too hard, and it was criticized at the time for having all the light-skinned “Black” characters played by white actors. Fredi Washington, who’d achieved a brief flash-in-the-pan taste of stardom as Peola, the young Black girl “passing” for white in the 1934 film Imitation of Life, protested that De Rochemont should have looked for genuine light-skinned Black actors to play the four Carters instead of having white people do it. (Ironically, when Imitation of Life was remade in 1959, a white actress, Susan Kohner, played Washington’s old role.) It’s likely that one reason De Rochemont cast the film the way he did was to avoid having any hint of miscegenation on screen, though that didn’t stop the cities of Atlanta, Georgia and Memphis, Tennessee from banning the film in their communities. Ironically, Lost Boundaries ends with an announcement by the reverend preaching the anti-racist sermon that the U.S. Navy has just eliminated the requirement that its officers must be white; the film was actually released one year after President Harry Truman issued his famous and courageous executive order banning all racial discrimination in the U.S. military. If only Bill Clinton had had that same kind of courage in 1993 and delivered on his promise to end military discrimination against Queers instead of bringing on the horrors of “don’t ask, don’t tell”!