Hoodlum Empire (Republic, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 17) I showed my husband Charles a YouTube post of a movie from Republic Pictures in 1952 that proved to be unexpectedly good: Hoodlum Empire. Like a lot of movies in the early 1950’s, it was inspired by the real-life televised U.S. Senate hearings led by Estes Kefauver (D-Tennessee) investigating the Mafia and the extent of organized crime’s reach into American life. In this version the Kefauver character is New York Senator Bill Stephens (Brian Donlevy, playing an honest politician 12 years after he famously played a corrupt one in Preston Sturges’ first film as a director, The Great McGinty), whom we first meet as chair of a Senate hearing on organized crime in general and the activities of New York gangster Nick Mancani (Luther Adler) in particular. Mancani is an ex-bootlegger who after Prohibition was repealed got into gambling, particularly slot machines, punchboards (a gambling device similar to today’s lottery scratchers; as the Wikipedia page on them explains, “Punchboards were often used by the slot-machine rackets as a wedge for pushing into communities where slot machines were illegal”), off-track horse racing and other sports bets. (It’s ironic to be watching a movie like this at a time when most of these enterprises have become legal, and sports bets in particular have become a multi-million dollar above-board business through companies like FanDuel and Draft Kings.) Mancani’s crazy enforcer is Charley Pignatelli (Forrest Tucker), who like my husband hates the diminutive of his name and insists on being called “Charles” instead.

The film was written by Hearst journalist Bob Considine, who was a big enough name he was ballyhooed on the original poster art and even with unusually prominent billing on the main credit. Considine was famous for ghost-writing autobiographies about people like General Douglas MacArthur, Captain Ted W. Lawson (one of the pilots on the famous Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, Japan in 1942), and baseball legend Babe Ruth. He was also fanatically anti-union, and when he wrote a decidedly unfavorable article on West Coast Longshoremen’s Union president Harry Bridges, Bridges told a friend, “What did you expect? He’s a Hearst man.” Considine is credited with the original story for this film and as co-author of the screenplay with Bruce Manning, who’d “made his bones” in Hollywood as writer of the early Deanna Durbin musicals One Hundred Men and a Girl, Mad About Music, That Certain Age, Three Smart Girls Grow Up, and The Amazing Mrs. Halliday. He’d also written considerably darker scripts, notably The Ninth Guest, about a group of people invited to a dinner party by a secretive host who plans to murder them one by one as part of a revenge scheme. (Manning and Gwen Bristow wrote this as a novel, The Invisible Host, in 1930; Owen Davis adapted it into a play that year, and Columbia Pictures filmed it in 1934 – all before Agatha Christie published her novel And Then There Were None (originally Ten Little Niggers, then Ten Little Indians, more recently Ten Little Soldiers) in 1939 and used the same plot gimmick.

The real central character of Hoodlum Empire is Mancani’s nephew, Joe Gray (John Russell, whose imdb.com head shot shows him in a cowboy had, reflecting Republic’s emphasis on cheap Westerns), who was a part of Mancani’s gang before he was drafted into World War II. Once he served he came out of the Army determined to “go straight” and give up his former life of crime. He’s also determined to give up his gang-moll girlfriend, Connie Williams (Claire Trevor, and it’s a delight to see her as a bad girl again after her surprisingly weak performance as the good girl in the 1946 Pat O’Brien vehicle Crack-Up). Instead he’s not only in love with but has actually married Marte Dufour (Vera Ralston, who’s been called the real-life Susan Alexander Kane because Republic studio head Herbert J. Yates made her his mistress and put her in film after film even though she was barely competent at best and downright offensive at worst; at least Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, had genuine talent as a light comedienne). She was originally Czech skating star Vera Hruba, and Yates added “Ralston” to her last name to make her sound American but couldn’t do anything about her accent, though at least here she’s playing a foreigner – a French Resistance fighter who literally saved Joe Gray’s life when she shot a German soldier who was about to kill him with a rifle from behind – and therefore her accent isn’t a problem. A surprisingly elaborate flashback sequence shows Gray, Stephens, army chaplain Simon Andrews (Grant Withers), and some others fighting in World War II, and this gives Gray his road-to-Damascus moment where he determines to live the rest of his life as an honest, law-abiding citizen. To that end, as soon as the war is over he settles in a small town called “Central City,” presumably in upstate New York, with Marte and has two kids with her. He also opens a gas station with a restaurant attached for long-haul truckers to get a decent meal.

One of the oddest things about Hoodlum Empire is that, for all the Right-wing associations of people like Herbert Yates (who once shut down an entire factory rather than accept a vote of his workers to unionize) and Bob Considine, it copies the multiple-flashback structure used by Left-leaning Orson Welles in the movie that dared not speak its name in Hearst’s company, Citizen Kane. Hoodlum Empire basically is a series of increasingly intense confrontations between Mancani, Pignatelli and their associates on one hand and Joe Gray and his honest business partners in the gas station on the other. Gray has been called to testify before the Stephens Committee on his knowledge of underworld activities, and Pignatelli in particular is anxious to shut him up – permanently – before that can happen. Determined both to live an honest life himself and not to rat out his uncle Mancani, Gray has pledged not to give the authorities any information about the crime syndicate his uncle runs. At one point Pignatelli tries to push Joe off the balcony of Mancani’s high-rise apartment to the street many floors below, and it’s only Mancani’s sudden order for Charlie to stop that saves Joe’s life. In order to make sure Joe doesn’t talk, Mancani and Pignatelli not only stage an invasion of slot machines into Central City – whereupon Gray’s honest co-workers beat up the gangsters sent to install them in their café – but create an elaborate frame-up so that Joe Gray appears to be the owner of the crooked slot machines and all the other gambling equipment the syndicate is bringing to town. When Simon Andrews, who was blinded by a sudden German attack in the World War II flashback, threatens to expose the frame-up to the FBI so Joe Gray will be believed after all when he testifies before the Stephens Committee, Pignatelli sends him hurtling down an elevator shaft and thereby dispatches him.

Now the only witness who can testify that Gray is not still involved in the rackets is his wife Marte, who overheard the meeting Joe had with Mancani when he dropped by their home – contradicting Mancani’s sworn testimony before the Stephens Committee that he had never visited Joe in Central City. The finale is a big shoot-out in Mancani’s apartment, in which Mancani is determined to eliminate Joe once and for all, only Joe’s ex-girlfriend Connie Williams (ya remember Connie Williams? Actually she’s been pretty inescapable throughout the movie, since she transferred her affections from Joe to Mancani once Joe became definitively unavailable to her) takes the bullet Mancani meant for Joe, and Pignatelli starts firing randomly and kills Mancani by accident as the cops arrive and take the survivors into custody. Hoodlum Empire was directed by Joseph Kane, who was mostly a director of hack Westerns but this time shows a definite eye for composition in a story set in contemporary times. Though Hoodlum Empire neither is nor pretends to be a film noir (it could have come closer if Joe had been shown as more conflicted), it’s quite well photographed by Reggie Lanning. It’s also quite well scored by composer Nathan Scott, who uses the old French folk song “Plaisir d’Amour” (best known to U.S. audiences as the source for the melody of Elvis Presley’s big hit, “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You”) as well as the usual slurpy saxophones that get constantly heard every time Lanning’s camera cranes up and shows the exterior of Mancani’s building. I was quite favorably impressed by Hoodlum Empire, and though it’s hardly a masterpiece it is a quite workmanlike piece of entertainment that deserves to be better known than it is.

Summer Stock, a.k.a. If You Feel Like Singing (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (June 16) afternoon I watched a comfortable old favorite of mine on Turner Classic Movies: Summer Stock (1950), Judy Garland’s last film as an MGM contract player. It’s an old-fashioned backstage musical of the type Garland and Mickey Rooney had been making at MGM a decade earlier (Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway), and both she and her co-star, Gene Kelly, were looking ahead to much stronger and more ground-breaking projects: Judy to A Star Is Born and Kelly to An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain. The plot, concocted by writers Sy Gomberg and George Wells and directed by one of Judy’s Gay friends, Charles Walters, casts Judy as New England farm woman Jane Falbury, who’s running her old family’s farm in collaboration with her aunt Esmeralda, known as “Esmé” (Marjorie Main, who practically steals this movie!). Jasper G. Wingait (Ray Collins), the richest man in town, is determined that Jane marry his son Orville (Eddie Bracken, playing a thoroughly annoying comic-relief character; Preston Sturges did wonderful things with him in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, but Walters, Gomberg, and Wells were hardly at Sturges’ level of talent, skill, or audacity) to reunite the two pioneering families that first settled this village in colonial times. The complications arise when Jane’s sister Abigail (Gloria DeHaven) shows up with a company of New York stage actors in tow. Abigail has been desperate to escape the farming community and borrowed money to go to college, then bailed out after a year, and has progressively tried writing and painting before settling on a career as an actress. She has fallen in love with Joe Ross (Gene Kelly), a singer, dancer, choreographer, and director who’s rehearsing a new show he wants to take to Broadway.

Without telling Jane in advance, Abigail invites Ross and his whole troupe to move into the Falbury barn and rehearse their show there. The film begins with Jane’s two farmhands, Zeb (Erville Alderson) and Frank (Paul E. Burns), announcing that because she hasn’t been able to pay them, they’re quitting to take factory jobs in the big city – and damned if it doesn’t look like we’ve been flashed back to the opening of The Wizard of Oz. Jane manages to talk Jasper Wingait into granting her a tractor with the understanding that she’ll be able to pay for it when her big harvest comes in, and she opens the film by belting out two songs, “If You Feel Like Singing, Sing” (which she starts naked in the shower – one wonders if the writers were inspired by the big scene in South Pacific in which Mary Martin sang “A Wonderful Guy” in her shower – and it’s amusing how Walters is able to maneuver Robert H. Planck’s camera to avoid showing more of Judy than the Production Code would allow) and “(Howdy Neighbor) Happy Harvest,” her ode to agriculture which she sings while driving the tractor to and around her farm. The song contains the embarrassing lyric, “When you work for Mother Nature/You’ll be paid by Father Time” – not one of the better efforts from composer Harry Warren (who’d “made his bones” in Hollywood with the sophisticated songs for the 1930’s Busby Berkeley musicals) and lyricist Mack Gordon. The moment Jane shows up with that tractor, we know that it’s going to be wrecked at some point in the story, and at first we think Jane is going to be the one who wrecked it. Later it turns out to be Joe’s comic-relief sidekick Herb Blake (Phil Silvers, one of that odd group of actors that had indifferent careers as character players in 1940’s movies but became stars on early TV: others include Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Raymond Burr, and Jackie Gleason), who was using the tractor to pull a tree stump, lost control and totally crashed it.

Esmé lays down the law to the actors and crew: she’ll let them stay on the farm, but only if they get up at 6 a.m. and do farm labor – which leads the writers to a lot of fish-out-of-water gags as they vainly try to milk cows, feed hogs, and collect eggs. Ultimately Abigail gets a bad case of diva-itis and runs off to Broadway with Harrison I. Keath (Hans Conried, voice-doubled by Pete Roberts), her partner in an incredibly pretentious song called “Mem’ry Island” (written by Warren and Gordon with tongues very firmly in cheeks) that sounds like it wandered in from a Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movie. In a plot twist that adds 42nd Street to the long, embarrassing list of other movies this one rips off, Joe Ross invites Jane to take Abigail’s place and puts her through a long, exhausting set of rehearsals to get her ready for the big opening night, at which he’s invited several Broadway producers (shades of Babes in Arms!) to witness the show and see if any of them want to back it on the Main Stem. Determined to shut down the show, Orville (ya remember Orville?) travels to Broadway to hunt down Abigail and bring her back to take over her part even if that means closing down the performance altogether. It ends pretty much the way you’d expect it too, with Jane and Joe pairing off and Abigail giving up her ambitions to stay in town, marry Orville and run the farm (so Jasper gets his longed-for reunion of the Wingait and Falbury families after all!).

Summer Stock was produced by Joe Pasternack (whose musicals former MGM boss Dore Schary once described as taking place in the “Land of Pasternacky,” with little or no connection to the real world) after MGM’s greatest musical producer, Arthur Freed, pretty much washed his hands of Judy Garland with the fiascoes of The Barkleys of Broadway and Annie Get Your Gun (in which she was replaced by Ginger Rogers and Betty Hutton, respectively). It’s actually a fun little musical if you can enjoy it for what it is and not see it through the lens of what both Judy Garland and Gene Kelly were capable of in more challenging material. Needless to say, Judy was a handful during production; Gene Kelly, who owed a lot to Judy Garland because she had insisted on him as her co-star in his first film, For Me and My Gal (1942), and had even had the writers redo the script so she ended up with Kelly’s character instead of George Murphy’s, complained to Pasternack that she reeked of formaldehyde. Later he discovered that it was actually a related chemical called paraldehyde, which Judy was taking as a drug to combat her alcoholism. She’s also considerably overweight through most of the film, which reminded me of the anecdote about how James Dean was put on a high-calorie diet before shooting East of Eden. When Dean asked why, he was told, “We want to fatten you up so you look like you grew up on a farm.” “But I did grow up on a farm!” Dean said. “Don’t you know how hard farm kids have to work?” When Summer Stock was in rough-cut form, Pasternack had it run for various MGM executives, who were disappointed in it and thought it needed another big production number to feature Judy Garland.

The problem was that Garland had gone off to a sanitarium to rest and recuperate after the strains of making the film, and by the time she re-emerged it was two months later and she was about 20 pounds lighter. Pasternack and the MGM executives licensed the old 1930 song by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, “Get Happy,” and had Judy perform it in the same androgynous costume in which she’d performed the unused song “Mr. Monotony” from Easter Parade with a male chorus line cavorting around her. The result was Judy’s most stunning turn in the film and a number so much better than the rest a lot of people assumed that it was an outtake from a previous Garland MGM film spliced into this one. It wasn’t. In Britain, Summer Stock was retitled If You Feel Like Singing because MGM’s British distributors didn’t think the American slang phrase “summer stock” (meaning a low-budget theatre production put on during the summer while the mainstream theatres were closed) would mean anything to a British audience. Under either title, it’s a quite accomplished feel-good musical even though it suffers from the annoying antics of Eddie Bracken and Phil Silvers, and a decent if not spectacular way for Judy Garland to end her MGM contract career. (Afterwards she was shoehorned in to replace June Allyson in the 1951 film Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire, but she blew off so many rehearsal and costume-fitting appointments that Dore Schary and Arthur Freed reluctantly fired her and Jane Powell took her place.) Judy would, of course, go on to bigger and better things with her new husband, Sid Luft, including the film A Star Is Born (1954) and a career as a major concert attraction, though her mental instability and constant drug use (MGM had got her hooked on prescription pills, not – as is commonly reported – to overwork her, but to keep her weight down to camera-friendly levels) made the rest of her life a troubled one until she died of an overdose in 1969.

The Boy Who Vanished, a.k.a. The Forgotten Son (Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 15) my husband Charles and I watched two unusually good (at least by their standards) Lifetime movies with been-there-seen-it-all titles: The Boy Who Vanished (shot under the working title The Forgotten Son) and Girl in the Attic. The Boy Who Vanished starts with a scene in which a young man calls 911 to report himself missing from his family. The young man is, or at least purports to be, Jackson “Jack” Reese (played by a very attractive actor named Aiden Howard), and he’s a teenager who ostensibly disappeared from home 12 years earlier. His parents are Haley Conner Reese (Tegan Moss) and her husband, Richard Reese (Matthew Kevin Anderson). The police keep him in custody for a few hours before finally releasing him to his (purported) parents. This includes giving him a DNA test (though we’re never told the results), and later on he takes an aptitude test at Montgomery, the local high school (the story is set in Seattle, presumably so the town of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada could “play” it), that reveals that, far from being academically behind where he should be given his age, he’s actually far advanced intellectually. He explains this by telling his parents that during the 12 years he was away, he was held inside a cult – not a religious or sexual one but a financially predatory one which survived by pulling scams on well-to-do people – and they made him read serious books and watch high-end movies on VHS tapes. Our first inkling that Jack isn’t what he says he is is a phone call he receives from Travis (Gord Pankhurst), a rather seedy-looking individual with 1960’s-style hippie-length hair who drives around in a light grey van and appears to be stalking the Reeses: Richard, Haley, Jack and Jack’s younger brother Tyler (Kingston Goodjohn), who’s understandably jealous of the new-found attention long-lost Jack is getting from his parents and is feeling neglected by comparison.

Jack assures whoever is calling (we don’t yet know it’s Travis but we soon learn that) that he’s still on board with the plan, but having both Travis and another accomplice, a red-haired woman named Luna (Maia Michaels) who accosts Richard while he’s getting into his car, spits on his car window and chews him out for thinking he’s better than she is just because he’s rich, stalk the Reeses is not helping with whatever the plan is. Travis and his partner, it turns out, are after the estimated $100 million Richard Reese is holding on behalf of his wealth-management clients; they sent Jack into the Reeses’ home to hack into his computer and use it to transfer all $100 million into their and their cult’s account. Only Luna jumps the gun by literally bumping into Richard at a second meeting and stealing his wallet, then using the information on his credit cards to order thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise and run up such big bills all the cards get canceled. So when all four Reeses (Richard, Haley, Jack, and Tyler) go out to a fancy restaurant, they’re unable to pay the bill until Haley realizes she has enough cash on her to cover it. (Why Richard didn’t notice his wallet missing until their dinner date is something of a mystery.) The only person in the Reeses’ circle who’s at all suspicious of Jack and his true motives is Haley’s brother, Michael Conner (Jesse Moss), who was initially the prime suspect in Jack’s disappearance 12 years earlier. Michael was suspected then because a few bits of Jack’s clothing were found in the trailer in which he lived, and because he was a heavy drug user – though the shock of being suspected of such a heinous crime led him to quit drugs.

With the plot starting to unravel and the Seattle police getting closer to them, Travis and Luna kidnap Michael and forge an e-mail in his name confessing to having killed Jack 12 years earlier after spiking his soda with drugs so he’ll O.D. and die. Haley goes to Michael’s trailer home to see him and finds him incapacitated, calls 911 and Michael is taken to a hospital, where the doctors literally bring him back from death’s door. Jack, as part of Travis’s and Luna’s plot, sneaks into Richard’s home office and gets ready to transfer the $100,000,000 – only when he’s there he finds his own birth certificate, which finally reveals the secret of his true parentage. The birth certificate lists “Haley Conner” as his mother but leaves the father’s name blank. It turns out the father was Travis’s brother Wyatt, whom we never see because either during her pregnancy or just after Jack was born, Haley and Wyatt got into an argument, Wyatt pulled a gun on her, they both reached for the gun (score another one for Chicago’s original author, Maurine Dallas Watkins!), and she accidentally shot him, then met Richard and agreed that she would marry him and they would raise Jack as if he were both of theirs. Only Travis has been convinced all these years that Haley deliberately murdered his brother, and this has all been an elaborate revenge plot not only to kill her but to destroy her reputation and her and her husband’s finances.

Ultimately Jack sets up the $100,000,000 transfer but at the last minute can’t go through with it, and there’s a predictable final confrontation in which Travis is about to kill both Haley and Jack when Richard sneaks up behind him and clobbers him with a convenient baseball bat. We’re not sure if Travis is arrested or killed, but Jack is reunited with Haley and Richard and seems to be on his way to a happy, well-adjusted life with his family and his high-school girlfriend Summer (Grace Beedie). Though there were a few points on which writer Ken Miyamoto could have been more clear-headed about plot details, for the most part The Boy Who Vanished is quite compelling suspense filmmaking, well directed by Christie Will Wolf. But in 2015 Lifetime did an even better movie, Lost Boy (reviewed at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/07/lost-boy-legrand-productions-lifetime.html), on the same theme, in which the supposedly long-lost son was deliberately faking it but the makers of that movie, writer Jennifer Maisel and director Tara Miele, kept his motives powerfully elusive.

Girl in the Attic (Studio TF1 America, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I wasn’t expecting much from the second movie on Lifetime’s schedule, Saturday, June 14’s “premiere,” Girl in the Attic, especially since there wasn’t an imdb.com page for it until Monday morning, June 16. But it too turned out to be surprisingly effective even though it hewed close to Lifetime’s standard formulae. The central character is Kelsey Romano (Sophia Carriere), a 16-year-old woman who’s responded to her mother’s recent death from breast cancer by determining to run a half-marathon race in her home town, Portland, Oregon. (Once again, as in The Boy Who Vanished, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada “played” a U.S. city in the Pacific Northwest.) She’s raising money by shooting a video blog and posting it on local social media, and so far she’s collected $5,000 in pledges, halfway to her $10,000 goal. Unfortunately, she’s decided to keep this a secret from her father (John Cassini), portrayed as a typical Italian-American working-class guy. Even more unfortunately, she’s attracted the twisted attentions of Billy (Keenan Tracey), who ironically combines both my husband Charles’s job and my former one. He’s a clerk at a big-box grocery store and he’s also a caregiver for his disabled mother Debbie (Jean Louisa Kelly), who was formerly a singer and dancer until an auto accident and impending arthritis combined to take away her mobility and leave her in a wheelchair. Billy kidnaps Kelsey by ambushing her while she’s on one of her practice runs. He lures her by pretending to be searching for a missing dog – and both Charles and I were taken aback by this plot line because, while “searching for a missing dog” is a classic line used by pedophiles to lure children they want to molest, we had a hard time imagining it working on someone as old and relatively worldly as Kelsey.

Billy sneaks Kelsey into the proverbial attic while Debbie is out with her neighbor Mrs. Byrd (Beth Fotheringham), who appears to be her only friend. When Kelsey comes to, she realizes she’s literally bound to an old mattress in the attic, and Billy is insisting that she’s going to be his “wife” as soon as she proves herself “worthy” of that rather dubious honor by obeying him implicitly. At one point Billy takes Kelsey downstairs to bathe her in Debbie’s bathtub, and Debbie finds women’s hair in the drain and deduces from that that Billy has been sneaking a woman in there. At first she assumes this is just a normal, mutually consensual relationship, and she even demands to meet her son’s new girlfriend. She sets up a dinner party for them that Sunday, but Billy claims that his girlfriend is “ill” and can’t come. Billy fakes a video showing Kelsey looking suitably sick, but Debbie catches on when she recognizes her old hope chest, containing relics of her entertainment career, in the background of the shot and realizes it was taken in her attic. When Debbie finally meets Kelsey, they realize that they’re both being held prisoner by an increasingly demented and power-mad Billy, and the two form a wary bond as they plot a means of escape. Debbie’s first idea is to have Kelsey, who now that Debbie is aware of her existence Billy has changed her status to that of live-in maid and forces her to do housework, spike his beer with old sleeping tablets left over from Debbie’s late husband’s stash. Only that plan is unwittingly foiled by Mrs. Byrd, who comes over and presents Billy with a wooden box containing high-end whiskey. Billy decides that he’d rather drink the whiskey than beer, and when he pours out the beer in the kitchen sink he sees the drug residue it leaves behind and realizes he’s been had.

Debbie’s next attempt to break herself and Kelsey from Billy’s control involves crawling up the steps to the attic (and Jean Louisa Kelly’s acting in this scene is so convincing I looked her up on Wikipedia just to see if she’s disabled in real life, which she isn’t), but unfortunately her cell phone slips out of her pocket and Billy grabs it before she can use it to call the police. Kelsey and Debbie finally make their escape when Debbie uses nail polish remover to set her house on fire – a major sacrifice on her part because her house was the one constant in her life and she’d moved heaven and earth to hold on to it – confident that Mrs. Byrd’s hearing aid will respond to the fire alarm and she’ll notice the house is burning and will call 911. Eventually the police arrive, arrest Billy, and in the final scene Kelsey is reunited with her dad after a year and a half in captivity and she’s once again running, literally, as if her life depended on it. There’s an intriguing plot twist that’s mentioned in the online summaries of this film but is only slightly alluded to in the movie itself: supposedly Billy is trying to monetize Kelsey’s captivity by forcing her to shoot sexually explicit videos and posting them online to pay-to-view sites. Girl in the Attic is a film shrouded in mystery: at least three people were listed in various online sources as its director – David Weaver, Kaila York, and Michael Mortimer (Weaver is the one named in the actual credits) – and the writing was done by a committee: Tawnya Bhattacharya, Jill Abbinanti-Burke, and Ali Laventhol.

The producing company is listed as “Studio TF1 America” (the imdb.com page for The Boy Who Vanished also lists “Studio TF1 America” as its producers, but the actual credits list Champlain Media and Reel One Entertainment), and at least one major crew member, cinematographer Diego Lozano, worked on both. But I quite liked it, mainly because of the moral ambiguity of the characters. Billy is depicted not as a stock-figure villain, but as a basically nice if weak and unassuming figure who’s lousy at normal social interactions and “grows a pair” in the worst way possible: by exerting absolute authority over two helpless women. Kelsey has a spunk about her that keeps her from being the usual Lifetime victim, and Debbie is in some ways the most interesting character in the movie. She’s shown perched on the thin edge between being wheelchair-bound, able to use a walker (which she calls “Bridget”), and being totally mobile. One of the cruelest scenes is when Billy deliberately flushes a whole bottle of her anti-arthritis medication down the toilet – only Kelsey rescues her by finding another bottle of the drug under a bed in a room she’s been ordered to clean. I don’t recall having heard of Jean Louisa Kelly before, but she’s actually had a pretty compelling career: she got her start as a child actress, playing the late John Candy’s obnoxious niece in Uncle Buck (1989) and having an important singing role in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). Kelly is also a quite competent singer who’s released at least two full-length albums, Color of Your Heart (2013) and a standards album called For My Folks (2017), as well as a five-song EP, Willing. She’s 53 years old, a tough age for women at any stage in entertainment history, but more power to her if she’s got as great and tough-minded a performance in her as the one she gives here!

Crack-Up (RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 14) I watched another “Noir Alley” showing of a quirky 1946 film from RKO, Crack-Up – not to be confused with a 1936 Crack-Up, an airplane drama with Peter Lorre as a foreign spy trying to steal the plans for a new plane for the proverbial sinister foreign power. This Crack-Up was made 10 years later and stars Pat O’Brien (who for some reason tried to revitalize his career at RKO in noir movies even though in his salad years at Warner Bros. he’d essentially been the good Irish guy to James Cagney’s bad Irish guy in films like Angels with Dirty Faces, in which Cagney played a gangster and O’Brien played a priest!) as, of all things, a curator at a big-city art museum. Crack-Up began as a short novel by crime and science-fiction writer Fredric Brown called Madman’s Holiday, though Brown’s original is almost impossible to find: it was republished only in a limited edition of just 350 copies and the quoted price on Amazon.com is $5,000. O’Brien was trying to restore his standing as a major star through “dark” roles in films like this one, Perilous Holiday (also 1946), and Riffraff (1947). In Perilous Holiday he was a reporter unjustly accused of being part of a counterfeiting ring he’s actually investigating for a story; in Riffraff he’s an unscrupulous private detective and “fixer” in Panama City; and in Crack-Up he’s a museum curator named George Steele, whose irreverent lectures to museum patrons as he leads them through tours have already got him on the outs with the management.

In the opening scene he’s shown literally trying to break into the museum where he works by smashing two windows and hitting a cop who tries to bust him. Steele is finally subdued and the museum’s management talks the cop out of pressing charges, saying they’ll handle the matter internally to avoid giving the museum a bad name. The museum has a large staff consisting of similarly venerable officials, including the museum director, Stevenson (Erskine Sanford); Traybin (Herbert Marshall), who’s on loan to the U.S. museum from the British Museum to investigate suspected art forgeries; Dr. Lowell (Ray Collins, reuniting him and Sanford from the cast of Citizen Kane), a member of the museum’s board as well as an M.D. who takes charge of Steele’s care; and two women, Steele’s girlfriend, magazine writer Terry Cordell (Claire Trevor), and Barton’s secretary Mary (Mary Ware). Steele is convinced he was in a train wreck the night he was caught trying to break into the museum, and we get vivid flashbacks as he’s interrogated by police lieutenant Cochrane (Wallace Ford), the cop who caught him. The flashbacks show Steele on a train after he responds to an emergency call from his family saying that his mother suddenly took ill and is on her deathbed, but Cochrane tells him there’s no record of a train accident in the area and Steele’s mother is just fine, thank you. (There’s a bit of a plot hole in that Steele pays for his train ticket but doesn’t collect it from the station window, and no conductor asks him for it while he’s on the train.) At least part of the MacGuffin involves two paintings, one by Thomas Gainsborough and one, Adoration of the Kings, by Albrecht Dürer, which the museum had been exhibiting on loan from European musea, only the Gainsborough was supposedly lost at sea when the ship taking it from the U.S. back to Britain blew up in an “accident,” but Steele was convinced that the Gainsborough being returned was in fact a copy and the real painting had never left the U.S. He wants to use an X-ray machine to examine the Dürer to see if it, too, is a fake, but Barton won’t buy him the X-ray machine because “we’re a museum, not a hospital.”

In an attempt to see what happened to him on his alleged train ride, Steele takes the same train the next night, asks various people he meets – including the conductor, the ticket agent, and a vendor selling snacks and cigarettes in the cars (the idea that you could still smoke on a train really dates this movie!) – and finally learns that the night before two men escorted a drunk who looked a lot like him off the train. Steele is convinced that he was the mystery “drunk,” and he’d actually been drugged to incapacitate him and discredit anything he might have to say about the fake paintings. (Bits of the “Gainsborough” were recovered from the shipwreck, and the British Museum did tests on them and determined the missing painting had been a fake.) This rather oddball recension of Gaslight with a male as the person being “gaslighted” has to do with a plot by someone connected with the museum to steal the original paintings, substitute copies, and then destroy the copies in fake “accidents” – and the objective behind the assaults on Steele has been to discredit him as an expert and therefore make sure his allegations that the paintings are fakes won’t be believed. For most of the movie I was thinking that Herbert Marshall’s character would turn out to be the villain, especially since he was playing the part with the same smarmy self-righteousness he brought to his actual villain role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1941), but the real bad guy turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Dr. Lowell, whose idea is to steal valuable paintings for his own collection and keep them from the rest of the world.

He even has a marvelously classist and elitist speech giving his justification: he says museums open the great works of art to people too stupid to appreciate them properly. Only, unlike most of the movie villains who steal famous works of art and keep them to themselves, he doesn’t have a private room in his home where he keeps them locked up so only he can look at them. Instead he hides them in his home behind a thoroughly mediocre painting, and we don’t learn where they are until the end, when Mary, who was part of his plot, agrees to tell the authorities where the real Gainsborough and Dürer are in exchange for leniency. Crack-Up got mediocre reviews and was a box-office disappointment, largely because critics of the time thought that the plot was too convoluted and hard to follow. Certainly all those old men in charge of the museum got a bit too tiresome, and too hard to tell apart, after a while. One big disappointment was the casting of Claire Trevor in a good-girl role rather than either a femme fatale, as she was in her best film, Murder, My Sweet (1944, and also at RKO), or the part of a gin-soaked former cabaret singer in Key Largo (1948) that won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. We watch her through the whole movie waiting for the claws to come out, and they never do. Still, Crack-Up is a compelling thriller despite the convoluted plotting, and it offers Pat O’Brien a quite good showcase as at least a slightly more complicated character than he usually got to play!

La Cage aux Folles (Da.Ma. Cinematografia, Les Artistes Associés, 1978_

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (June 12) I watched a legendary movie I can’t recall ever having seen before: the original La Cage aux Folles (1978), a French-Italian co-production based on a 1973 play by Jean Poiret about a Gay male couple who own a nightclub together in a resort community in the south of France. The more butch member of the couple is Renato Baldi (Ugo Tognazzi, who was supplied by the Italian studio, Da.Ma. Cinematografia, and who refused to speak any language besides Italian, so director and co-screenwriter Éduardo Molinaro had to tweak his lines so the French version, spoken by a voice double, would match his lip movements). His partner, who owns 80 percent of La Cage aux Folles nightclub and stars in its drag shows, is Albin Mougeotte, who performs as “Zaza Napoli.” (According to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, “Folle” is French slang for an effeminate Gay man.) Twenty years earlier, Renato ended up in a single compromising encounter with a woman, Simone Deblon (Claire Maurier), and in one of those “infallible pregnancies at a single contact” classic-era Hollywood producer David O. Selznick often ridiculed, Renato’s one-night walk on the straight side produced a son, Laurent (Rémi Laurent, who’s easily the sexiest guy in the movie even though one wonders how Renato keeps all the horny Gay guys in his establishment from hitting on his son). It’s not clear just how Laurent has been raised – we do know his mom bailed on him almost as soon as he was born, and we get the impression that his dad was the custodial parent but he spent most of his time in boarding schools and camps.

But he’s fallen in love and become engaged to marry Andréa Charrier (Luisa Manieri), the rather empty-headed daughter of Right-wing French politician Simon Charrier (Michel Galabru) and his wife Louise (Carmen Scarpitta). Simon was the speechwriter for the French president, who ran on a “Unity and Morals” ticket, until said President suddenly died of a heart attack while in the middle of having sex with an underage prostitute. Now the media are hounding Simon for comment and he’s been reduced to coming and going to his house via a ladder to escape the omnipresent gaggle of journalists and bottom-feeders. Trying to talk up her fiancé and get her parents to agree to the marriage, Andréa has invented an elaborate tale that Laurent is really from a family of diplomats, with his father being sent around the world on a regular basis while his mother is a housewife. Naturally the Charrier parents want to meet the remarkable young man who’s about to become their son-in-law, and they essentially invite themselves to dinner at Renato’s home not realizing that a) he’s Gay, b) he’s in a 20-year relationship, and c) both men make their livings running a drag club. There’s a grimly amusing scene in which Renato, Albin, Laurent and their manservant, a queeny Black man named Jacob (Benny Luke) who appears to be an immigrant from one of France’s former African colonies with a penchant for wearing as little as possible and disdaining shoes, try frantically to “de-Gay” their living space in preparation for the Charriers’ visit. This includes removing all the sexually explicit statuary – mostly reproductions of Greek athletic nudes but also a bowl in the shape of an ass and a statuette with a prominent (and decidedly beyond scale) penis sticking out of the front. When one of them breaks off the statue’s dick, they decide they can leave the rest of it in place.

In preparation for the dinner, Albin decides to show up in full drag and pose as Laurent’s mother, while Renato has meanwhile gone to visit Laurent’s actual mother, who in the meantime has become a major executive and is referred to as “Madame President.” He’s able to get in to see her despite the usual phalanx of receptionists and secretaries controlling access to her, and – much to the disgust of Albin, who’s tagged along for the ride and is waiting outside Simone’s office – the two of them huddle inside and the red door indicating that no one is allowed to enter and interrupt them goes on. Simone agrees to show up at the dinner party and acknowledge her actual status as Laurent’s mother and also pretend that she and Renato have had an ongoing relationship. Renato and Albin have Jacob dress up in full butler’s uniform, including shoes, and serve the dinner – though Jacob uses a set of sexually explicit plates with the same ancient Greek-style depictions of athletes as on the statues they got rid of. Jacob hurriedly covers the potentially offensive images with a yucky-looking red soup he announces is from an old peasants’ recipe. Meanwhile, the reporters and paparazzi, alerted by a leak from Simon Carriere’s chauffeur (Venantino Venantini), have surrounded La Cage aux Folles and the home above it with cameras at the ready, eager to top the scandal of the supposedly “moral” French president shacking up with an underage Black prostitute with one about his campaign manager visiting a Gay bar in the south of France. With the media bottom-feeders and scumbags surrounding the place, Renato and Albin decide there’s only one way to get Simon out of the way safely: by dressing him in drag. The finale takes place at the big church wedding of Laurent and Andréa.

La Cage aux Folles (the official English translation was Birds of a Feather, though Google Translate renders it as The Cage of the Madwomen!) became the most popular foreign-language film ever released in the U.S. until the Chinese martial-arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000 topped it, and it was a ground-breaking movie in a lot of aspects, including not only presenting an older Gay male couple but showing them as still very much in love despite the constant bickering much like long-term married straight couples. Ironically, though I was familiar with the story through its American incarnations – my late partner John Gabrish bought the original cast CD of the 1983 U.S. musical adaptation by Gay composer Jerry Herman and Gay playwright Harvey Fierstein, and I’d seen the brilliantly funny 1996 U.S. remake The Birdcage, directed by Mike Nichols, written by Elaine May (reuniting them from the short-lived two-person improv act they had done in the early 1960’s with sensational success) and starring Robin Williams (as the more butch of the partners because he had already done Mrs. Doubtfire and he didn’t want to do two drag roles in a row) and Nathan Lane, with the action moved to South Florida – I don’t think I’d ever seen the original film until last night. Charles had seen it many times, and I’m sure it had been on the periphery of my cultural awareness even though I never actually sought it out.

I also remember reading about it in Steven Bach’s Final Cut, his memoir of his years as a United Artists production executive, in which he recalled visiting the set in the south of France and hearing the actors complain about the incredible heat they faced wearing their elaborate drag costumes both indoors on the sets and outdoors in the hot sun of a southern French summer. It still holds up surprisingly well as a rambunctious farce with a veiled but unmistakable political subtext (which, not surprisingly, became considerably less veiled in the 1983 musical, with its big anthemic song “I Am What I Am” that became a near-mandatory item on the playlists at Pride events), even though – an old bugbear of mine – there’s almost no depiction of physical affection among the characters that are supposed to be Gay. Granted that Renato and Albin are a long-term couple and their ardor in (and out of) the bedroom has no doubt cooled over time, but still my husband Charles and I (who’ve been together as a couple for 30 years and been legally married for nearly 17) kiss and hold hands together sometimes!

Desire (Paramount, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (June 11) I watched another movie in Turner Classic Movies’ month-long salute to “Star of the Month” Gary Cooper: Desire, a 1936 romantic comedy starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper (billed in that order! In their one previous film, Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco from 1930, he had been top-billed) in a rather strange tale that casts her as a jewel thief and him as her unwitting “mule.” Desire began as a Hungarian play called Die Schönen Tage von Aranjuez (The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez) by Hans Székely and Robert A. Stemmle, which got adapted by no fewer than five writers: Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Samuel Hoffenstein, Virginia Lawrence, and Benn W. Levy (the last two uncredited). Gary Cooper plays Tom Bradley, a mechanical engineer for the Brunson car company, who is pleading with his boss, Mr. Gibson (William Frawley – so, even though he and Dietrich never appear in the same scene, that still puts Dietrich one degree of separation from Lucille Ball!), to be allowed a two-week vacation to visit France and Spain. The film actually opens in Paris, where Madeleine de Beaupre (Marlene Dietrich) – who’s referred to throughout the film as “Countess,” even though she isn’t one – hatches an elaborate plot to steal a two-million franc pearl necklace from jeweler Aristide Duvalle (Ernest Cossart). Then she slips the swag into the jacket pocket of Tom Bradley and follows him across the France-Spain border, at one point stealing his car and then crashing it. Bradley doesn’t discover what happened to his car until he sees its spare tire, emblazoned with the slogan “You’ll Be Happy Driving a Brunson 8,” on the back of a horse-drawn cart.

Madeleine has to meet up with her partner in crime, Carlos Margoli (John Halliday), and give him and Aunt Olga (a marvelous crotchety-old-lady performance by Zeffie Tilbury) the necklace, which means she has to get close enough to Tom Bradley to pick his pocket and get the necklace back. Desire was directed by Frank Borzage, though Ernst Lubitsch is listed as the producer, and the film is full of the famous “Lubitsch touches” like the argument Bradley and Gibson get into over what the advertising slogan on the tire should be (Gibson proposed “You’ll Be Delighted” and “You’ll Be Glad,” and they compromised on “You’ll Be Happy”) and the process by which Madeleine actually steals the necklace. She poses as the wife of prominent psychiatrist Dr. Maurice Pouquet (Alan Mowbray) and asks Duvalle to present Dr. Pouquet with the bill, then tells Dr. Pouquet that Duvalle is her husband and has a mania for presenting people with bills for items they didn’t order. But once the intrigue settles down it’s an oddly dull film, not bad but also not sparkling the way Lubitsch’s best films were. In that respect it reminded me of another film Lubitsch produced and someone else (George Cukor) directed, One Hour with You (1932). Through the later stages of the film I was wondering how the writing committee was going to allow the Cooper and Dietrich characters to get together while fulfilling the iron dictates of the Production Code that criminals must always be punished, somehow, for their crimes. They did it by having Bradley hit on the idea of returning to Paris and presenting Duvalle with the stolen necklace, saying they were “returning” it and managing to get him to drop the charges against her. I couldn’t help but compare this film to one of Lubitsch’s masterpieces, Trouble in Paradise (1932), also a rom-com about jewel thieves but one which took advantage of the relative freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” period of loose Code enforcement.

Desire had more than its share of behind-the-scenes perils. While they were making Morocco together Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper had had an affair – no surprise there since Dietrich was notorious for seducing virtually all her leading men – only when she wanted Cooper as the leading man for her next film, Dishonored (1931), he flatly turned it down. Dietrich wondered what she’d done to offend him so much he didn’t want to work with her again, but Cooper’s problem wasn’t with Dietrich. It was with her director, Josef von Sternberg, whom Cooper had first worked with on the 1928 film Children of Divorce. It was Clara Bow’s next film after It, and, impressed by Cooper’s bit part as a reporter on that film, she’d requested him for her male lead. Alas, the film went so far behind schedule that when the Paramount executives assigned Sternberg to take it over and complete it in a few days, he executed that order by having the soundstage doors locked and cots moved in so the actors couldn’t leave the set. He had food and drink brought in so they could eat, and allowed them to sleep between takes when they weren’t actually needed on camera, but Cooper found the whole experience appalling (understandably) and blamed Sternberg for it. He agreed – reluctantly – to make Morocco for him, but he was once again appalled, this time by Sternberg’s insistence on directing Dietrich in German even though the film was in English. Adolphe Menjou, the film’s second male lead, had grown up in France and had learned German as a second language, but the rest of the cast and crew were not happy about Sternberg giving Dietrich directions in a language they couldn’t understand. But Cooper liked working with Dietrich and as soon as he was offered a film with her that didn’t involve Sternberg, he took it.

Dietrich had also started an affair with faded silent-film star John Gilbert and had even let him move into her home. She used her clout to get him cast in the second male lead, but in the meantime Gilbert went to see his ex, Greta Garbo, and Dietrich had a hissy-fit and threw him out. Then Gilbert died suddenly of the long-term ill effects of his chronic alcoholism, and so Paramount had to recast the part. It’s a pity they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get John Barrymore for it – the part cried out for Barrymore’s intensity and got Halliday’s querulousness. Also for some unearthly reason, in 1935 Paramount’s executives had hired Lubitsch as their studio head, which worked out about as well as it did for Columbia 50 years later when they gave the job of running the studio to British producer David Puttnam on the strength of his mega-hit Chariots of Fire. One wonders why Paramount thought a European known for his sophisticated films could run an entire studio and greenlight the sorts of bread-and-butter American movies that were the major companies’ stock in trade, and three years later they not only relieved Lubitsch of the job of running the studio but fired him as a director as well. (Lubitsch went to MGM, where he made two of his finest films, Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner, before ending his career at 20th Century-Fox.) It also doesn’t help that Dietrich sings just one song in Desire, “Awake in a Dream,” by Friedrich Holländer (who’d become her favorite songwriter after his songs for The Blue Angel and whom she insisted on bringing to America, though Paramount “Americanized” his name as “Frederick Hollander”), in John Halliday’s living room, supposedly accompanying herself on piano but with Borzage and cinematographers Charles Lang and (uncredited) Victor Milner shooting from one of those damnable angles that interposes the bulk of the piano between us and her and therefore makes it all too obvious that she isn’t really playing it. I wouldn’t call Desire a bad movie; it’s reasonably entertaining, but it could have been a lot better, and it doesn’t help that Lubitsch had made a much funnier and more charming film about international jewel thieves in Trouble in Paradise four years earlier.