by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
One was my DVD recording of last night’s Capitol Fourth concert on PBS, which surprised me by being decidedly inferior to the National Memorial Day concert from last May 24 I’d just got around to watching yesterday morning on the ground that an orgy of patriotism would be an appropriate way to begin the Fourth of July. The big problem was that the greatness-to-schlock ratio was way out of whack; conducted (as was the Memorial Day concert) by Erich Kunzel with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Capitol Fourth concert began with a marvelous performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Aretha Franklin. Aretha essentially turned the national anthem into a gospel song, varying the melody, “worrying” the notes and changing the word “o’er” the two times it appears to “over” just so she could have an extra note to play with. It was a marvelous performance, in some ways closer to Jimi Hendrix’ famous instrumental recording from Woodstock than any other vocal version, and my only regrets were 1) she only sang the familiar first chorus (I wanted to hear more!) and 2) the rest of the concert was going to have a hard time following her.
They didn’t even try; instead the program bee-lined straight from the sublime to the beneath-ridiculous and brought out Barry Manilow for three songs: “It’s a Miracle,” a medley of “Daybreak” with “This One’s for You” and “Somewhere in the Night,” and “Copacabaña” (I hadn’t heard “Copacabaña” since it was originally popular in the late 1970’s and frankly I’d forgotten what a terrible song it is; it’s got an infectious hook, all right, but the rest of it sucks rotten eggs). It got even worse than that as they brought out the Sesame Street Muppets for a ghastly medley of the Sesame Street theme with some of the songs representing the individual Muppet characters — “Elmo’s World,” “I Love Trash,” “Somebody Come and Play” and “’C’ Is for Cookie” — which made me think that it was a pity Dick Cheney was no longer in office, because if he’d been there he probably would have had this music replace Yoko Ono and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as the material with which to torture — excuse me, aid in “enhanced interrogation” of — the Guantánamo detainees.
Then they brought on Natasha Bedingfield, a singer I ordinarily like (despite the irony of celebrating American independence by bringing on a performer from the country we won our independence from), singing the Carpenters’ “Sing” — a song that under ordinary circumstances would have suited her voice well even though it doesn’t have the awesome purity of Karen Carpenter’s — only they had her do it with the Muppets, who as if we hadn’t been tortured (excuse me, “enhanced”) enough at this point came back again for a medley of George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Boy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” After that things got at least marginally better: the current company of the Four Seasons biomusical Jersey Boys (Jared Spector, Josh Franklin, Devin May and Michael Ingersoll) came on for a Four Seasons medley (“Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man” — devastatingly parodied by the show Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit as “Walk like a man/Sing like a girl” — “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” and their comeback record, “Oh, What a Night”) that was a good deal better than most of the material that had preceded it and reminded us of what marvelous ear candy the Four Seasons’ recordings were even though as artists they were blown away, first by the Beach Boys and then, even more definitively, by the Beatles.
After that Natasha Bedingfield came back to do her hit “Pocketful of Sunshine” and things got better with a performance of bits and pieces of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue featuring pianists Michael Feinstein and Andrew von Oyer (it seemed hardly necessary to engage two pianists for music Gershwin wrote for one, but at least Feinstein has a direct Gershwin connection — all those years he worked as an assistant to Ira — and his presence was welcome, as was the TV director’s decision twice to copy the great overhead shot, with the camera revolving as it looks down at the piano[s], with which Irving Rapper ended the 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue) and Aretha Franklin dredging up two of her old soul hits, “Think” and “Respect.” Though her voice isn’t as loud, imposing or flexible as it was when she recorded the originals, she’s enough of a canny old professional that she managed to rework them and still blow away everyone and everything else on the program.
After that it was another sorry return by Barry Manilow doing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” (appropriating the national anthem of the country we won independence from!) and a supposedly “inspirational” original called “Let Freedom Ring” (it was actually a relief when they began the fireworks during this number!) and then the usual ending fare: the last few minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture complete with fireworks (visible and audible), cannons and a chorus, a march medley by — let me make sure I have all of these — the U.S. Army’s Marching Trumpets, Drum and Fife Corps (who plays a fife in the 21st century, for heaven’s sake?) and Ceremonial Marching Band (they all make a joyful noise but the Marine Corps Band is better), followed by a ride-out featuring the full National Symphony Orchestra in Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
The patriotism wasn’t the problem with this concert; the problem was the sheer amount of tripe with which it was weighed down so that only Aretha Franklin emerged triumphant from the morass of terrible music (the Muppets’ selection), mediocre music (Manilow’s originals), and good music ill-treated (Bedingfield’s features and the Gershwin and Tchaikovsky bits). And incidentally I’m still amused by the fact that the intensely moving recitation about Iraq War victim José Pequeño in the 2009 Memorial Day concert (overall a much better show than the Fourth of July concert!) was followed by Katherine McPhee singing, of all songs, “Somewhere” from West Side Story — composed by anti-war Leftist Bisexual Leonard Bernstein …
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
National Memorial Day Concert (PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The 20th annual National Memorial Day Concert, telecast on PBS May 24, 2009, was the usual mixed bag — I’ve set the DVD recorder to record tonight’s Capitol Fourth concert with the same sources, but something about me this morning wanted an early fix of patriotism, so here goes — it opened with a sappy version of the “safe” verses of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” so overarranged that one expected the Radio City Rockettes to come out any moment and start kicking (that distant rumble was Woody Guthrie turning over in his grave), and sung by Brian Stokes Mitchell, whom I used to like but whose voice has settled into an uncomfortable space between Paul Robeson’s and Boris Karloff’s, and who did an equally ghastly (if somewhat less relentlessly overarranged) version of “God Bless America” that had me longing for the resurrection of Kate Smith (or at least wishing that they’d just plugged in the famous film clip of her singing it from the 1943 movie This Is the Army).
Then they brought in operatic mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” (just the first and most famous verse), and though the arrangement wasn’t all that impressive it was fascinating to hear her add an interpolated high note at the end: this song is hard enough to sing come scritto that I admired her chutzpah in making it even harder, and meeting her self-set challenge with gusto! After that violinist Robert McDuffie was brought on to play the Ashokan Farewell (a pre-existing piece that Ken Burns used as the theme for his documentary The Civil War) and Laurence Fishburne was brought on during it to read a letter President Lincoln wrote to the mother of a soldier killed in the Civil War.
Indeed, the theme of tonight’s concert was the losses from war, not only those killed but also those wounded and left permanently disabled (a Zeitgeist shift from the celebration of war in the post-9/11 Bush years to a consciousness of its horrible costs? I hope that was intentional! BTW, Michelle Obama was at the concert but the President wasn’t — there was an empty seat beside hers), the orchestra (the National Symphony under Erich Kunzel, who’s conducted all 20 of these concerts) played the theme from the movie Gettysburg, and then Denyce Graves came back for one of the high points of the evening, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which she made absolutely wrenching despite yet another bombastic overarrangement.
Then they brought on Chinese-born pianist Lang Lang (one of the musicians the American Record Guide loves to hate — they’ve jokingly called him “Bang Bang,” though that doesn’t overly bother me because I rather like percussive piano players — which is probably why my favorite jazz pianists include the boogie-woogie guys as well as Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Herbie Nichols and Cecil Taylor — and Duke Ellington, especially when he played those loud, banging chromatic chords with which he used to kick-start his band musicians) for an excessively shortened version of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 (basically what you would have heard if you had played the first and last side of a 78 rpm recording and just left out all six sides in the middle), following which he joined singer Katherine McPhee for a version of “America, the Beautiful” — her contribution was unexceptionable (though a major comedown after Graves’ spectacular “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and I couldn’t help wishing Graves had got to sing this, too) but his, in the middle of a singularly treacly orchestral arrangement, suggested he was getting in touch with his inner Liberace.
The next part of the concert was its most bizarre and affected portion, but also incredibly moving: a dialogue between actresses Dianne Wiest and Katie Holmes (the third Mrs. Tom Cruise) portraying the mother and sister, respectively, of José Pequeño, a New Hampshire man who left his job as police chief of one of the state’s small towns (the youngest police chief in the state) to join the Army and was critically injured when an insurgent threw a bomb into his Humvee while he was checking out a reported suicide bomber. The driver was killed instantly, and frankly after we learned what happened to Pequeño the driver seemed like the lucky one; he was rushed to a military field hospital and the doctors there removed two lobes of his brain, giving his head a sunken-in quality on his left side. He got a Veterans’ Administration disability pension but that went to his wife; mom and daughter assumed the full-time burden of caring for him, moving to Washington so they could be near the VA hospital in which he was being treated and giving up their home, their jobs, their incomes and their lives — they exhausted their savings and lived on ramen noodles for three months before sister finally found a temp job in the VA hospital so she could make some money while still being present in case her brother’s condition took a turn for the worse.
We were obviously supposed to admire these people and the incredible sacrifice they were making for their brother’s welfare — such as it is; his doctors regarded it as a miracle when he responded to his mother’s touch by actually saying, “Mom” (i.e., that he had to go through the maturation process all over again and had finally learned to pronounce the first syllable with which almost everyone starts to talk) — yet I found myself getting angrier and angrier as this segment progressed: angrier at the war itself — the sheer pointlessness of the sacrifice this poor young man with so much potential had made just to satisfy George W. Bush’s ego and the way his country had treated him (and at that he was getting better and more conscientious care from the VA than a lot of servicemembers who almost literally have been dumped out in the streets!) — and, let’s face it, at all war (and as I noted above, I credit the producers of this year’s Memorial Day concert for avoiding the implicit celebration of war that’s afflicted some of their previous concerts — though they did the obligatory medley of military service themes and had on the current head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and retired general Colin Powell for speeches, the general tenor of this show was much more sorrow at the losses from war than exultation of the military spirit).
The rest of the program was a bit anticlimactic after the haunting power of the Pequeño story: a sappy song called “When I Go the Distance” sung by the oddly sepulchral voice of Brian Stokes Mitchell; a montage of footage from previous National Memorial Day concerts to celebrate the 20th anniversary; an eerie song called “Bring Him Home” sung by Colm Wilkinson in an odd countertenor with such weird diction that it took me about half the first chorus to realize he was singing in English, not Gaelic — and then yet another jolting and welcome song, “Say a Prayer for Peace” by country star Trace Adkins (I’m taking their word for that since I’d never heard of him before, though judging from this powerful song I’d like to hear more!), which aside from being an intense piece of music in its own right (especially as projected by Adkins’ imposing Johnny Cash-ish baritone) was also a welcome denunciation of war and of that part of human nature that chooses to wage it and thereby forces other nations to engage in it to defend themselves. All in all a mixed bag, and yet a much more powerful and moving — and ideologically congenial, at least to me — concert than many of these previous affairs have been!
The 20th annual National Memorial Day Concert, telecast on PBS May 24, 2009, was the usual mixed bag — I’ve set the DVD recorder to record tonight’s Capitol Fourth concert with the same sources, but something about me this morning wanted an early fix of patriotism, so here goes — it opened with a sappy version of the “safe” verses of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” so overarranged that one expected the Radio City Rockettes to come out any moment and start kicking (that distant rumble was Woody Guthrie turning over in his grave), and sung by Brian Stokes Mitchell, whom I used to like but whose voice has settled into an uncomfortable space between Paul Robeson’s and Boris Karloff’s, and who did an equally ghastly (if somewhat less relentlessly overarranged) version of “God Bless America” that had me longing for the resurrection of Kate Smith (or at least wishing that they’d just plugged in the famous film clip of her singing it from the 1943 movie This Is the Army).
Then they brought in operatic mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” (just the first and most famous verse), and though the arrangement wasn’t all that impressive it was fascinating to hear her add an interpolated high note at the end: this song is hard enough to sing come scritto that I admired her chutzpah in making it even harder, and meeting her self-set challenge with gusto! After that violinist Robert McDuffie was brought on to play the Ashokan Farewell (a pre-existing piece that Ken Burns used as the theme for his documentary The Civil War) and Laurence Fishburne was brought on during it to read a letter President Lincoln wrote to the mother of a soldier killed in the Civil War.
Indeed, the theme of tonight’s concert was the losses from war, not only those killed but also those wounded and left permanently disabled (a Zeitgeist shift from the celebration of war in the post-9/11 Bush years to a consciousness of its horrible costs? I hope that was intentional! BTW, Michelle Obama was at the concert but the President wasn’t — there was an empty seat beside hers), the orchestra (the National Symphony under Erich Kunzel, who’s conducted all 20 of these concerts) played the theme from the movie Gettysburg, and then Denyce Graves came back for one of the high points of the evening, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which she made absolutely wrenching despite yet another bombastic overarrangement.
Then they brought on Chinese-born pianist Lang Lang (one of the musicians the American Record Guide loves to hate — they’ve jokingly called him “Bang Bang,” though that doesn’t overly bother me because I rather like percussive piano players — which is probably why my favorite jazz pianists include the boogie-woogie guys as well as Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Herbie Nichols and Cecil Taylor — and Duke Ellington, especially when he played those loud, banging chromatic chords with which he used to kick-start his band musicians) for an excessively shortened version of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 (basically what you would have heard if you had played the first and last side of a 78 rpm recording and just left out all six sides in the middle), following which he joined singer Katherine McPhee for a version of “America, the Beautiful” — her contribution was unexceptionable (though a major comedown after Graves’ spectacular “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and I couldn’t help wishing Graves had got to sing this, too) but his, in the middle of a singularly treacly orchestral arrangement, suggested he was getting in touch with his inner Liberace.
The next part of the concert was its most bizarre and affected portion, but also incredibly moving: a dialogue between actresses Dianne Wiest and Katie Holmes (the third Mrs. Tom Cruise) portraying the mother and sister, respectively, of José Pequeño, a New Hampshire man who left his job as police chief of one of the state’s small towns (the youngest police chief in the state) to join the Army and was critically injured when an insurgent threw a bomb into his Humvee while he was checking out a reported suicide bomber. The driver was killed instantly, and frankly after we learned what happened to Pequeño the driver seemed like the lucky one; he was rushed to a military field hospital and the doctors there removed two lobes of his brain, giving his head a sunken-in quality on his left side. He got a Veterans’ Administration disability pension but that went to his wife; mom and daughter assumed the full-time burden of caring for him, moving to Washington so they could be near the VA hospital in which he was being treated and giving up their home, their jobs, their incomes and their lives — they exhausted their savings and lived on ramen noodles for three months before sister finally found a temp job in the VA hospital so she could make some money while still being present in case her brother’s condition took a turn for the worse.
We were obviously supposed to admire these people and the incredible sacrifice they were making for their brother’s welfare — such as it is; his doctors regarded it as a miracle when he responded to his mother’s touch by actually saying, “Mom” (i.e., that he had to go through the maturation process all over again and had finally learned to pronounce the first syllable with which almost everyone starts to talk) — yet I found myself getting angrier and angrier as this segment progressed: angrier at the war itself — the sheer pointlessness of the sacrifice this poor young man with so much potential had made just to satisfy George W. Bush’s ego and the way his country had treated him (and at that he was getting better and more conscientious care from the VA than a lot of servicemembers who almost literally have been dumped out in the streets!) — and, let’s face it, at all war (and as I noted above, I credit the producers of this year’s Memorial Day concert for avoiding the implicit celebration of war that’s afflicted some of their previous concerts — though they did the obligatory medley of military service themes and had on the current head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and retired general Colin Powell for speeches, the general tenor of this show was much more sorrow at the losses from war than exultation of the military spirit).
The rest of the program was a bit anticlimactic after the haunting power of the Pequeño story: a sappy song called “When I Go the Distance” sung by the oddly sepulchral voice of Brian Stokes Mitchell; a montage of footage from previous National Memorial Day concerts to celebrate the 20th anniversary; an eerie song called “Bring Him Home” sung by Colm Wilkinson in an odd countertenor with such weird diction that it took me about half the first chorus to realize he was singing in English, not Gaelic — and then yet another jolting and welcome song, “Say a Prayer for Peace” by country star Trace Adkins (I’m taking their word for that since I’d never heard of him before, though judging from this powerful song I’d like to hear more!), which aside from being an intense piece of music in its own right (especially as projected by Adkins’ imposing Johnny Cash-ish baritone) was also a welcome denunciation of war and of that part of human nature that chooses to wage it and thereby forces other nations to engage in it to defend themselves. All in all a mixed bag, and yet a much more powerful and moving — and ideologically congenial, at least to me — concert than many of these previous affairs have been!
Friday, July 3, 2009
Week-End at the Waldorf (MGM, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a “feature,” the 1945 MGM all-star film Week-End at the Waldorf (that antique spelling of “Week-End,” as two words with a hyphen between, is the one on the main title), a cleverly reworked remake of the 1932 film Grand Hotel with the locale changed from a fictitious hotel in Berlin to the real Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City (a second unit shot footage of the exterior of the real Waldorf and it was matched to studio sets in Hollywood) and the original script by Hans Kräly (based on the 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel by German writer Vicki Baum, her own German-language stage adaptation of it in 1930 and the English-language version adapted by William A. Drake and staged on Broadway later in 1930) is quite cleverly redone by Guy Bolton and Sam and Bella Spewack for an American setting in the immediate aftermath of World War II (the film was released in October 1945 but filmed while the war was still going on).
The Spewacks would shortly go on to do an even more creative reworking of an even more prestigious play — the musical Kiss Me, Kate, based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and paralleling the Shakespeare play with the real lives of the divorced couple who are starring in a production of it — and some of the same sensibility is apparent here. The on-the-way-down ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) becomes movie star Julie Malvern (Ginger Rogers), who’s just about to open her latest and most prestigious film at its New York premiere; and the Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore), a jewel thief who romances her to get access to her room but then finds himself falling genuinely in love with her, becomes war correspondent Chip Collyer (Walter Pidgeon), who when he stumbles into Julie’s room (whose entrance is disguised as the door to a supply room!) while chasing down a story involving the occupants of the room next door to hers — more on that later — and is mistaken for the jewel thief Julie’s maid Anna (Rosemary DeCamp) had previously warned her about, who we never see (we’re told during the movie that the real thief has been arrested elsewhere), and in what is only the second time I can recall in the history of filmmaking that a remake has directly referenced its original film, Chip starts trying to seduce Julie with some of John Barrymore’s dialogue and she recognizes it and says, “That’s Grand Hotel!” (The other film I’m aware of that pulled a similar trick was We’re Not Dressing, the 1934 Bing Crosby-Carole Lombard vehicle that was a remake of James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton — in which sailor Crosby, addressing the socialites whose yacht has run aground on a desert island and stranded them there, announces that he’s seen the previous film of this story, Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female, and he’s going to take over and assume the role of Crichton to ensure their survival.)
Kringelein, the terminally ill bookkeeper who comes to the Grand Hotel with his life’s savings determined to enjoy his final days to the hilt — so memorably played by Lionel Barrymore in the original Grand Hotel — here becomes Captain James Hollis (Van Johnson), a military pilot who’s on his way to Washington, D.C. for a delicate operation to remove some shrapnel inside him — an operation he’s told by the hotel doctor, Robert Campbell (Warner Anderson), that only has a 50 percent chance of success — and somehow a man who’s facing the prospect of an operation that he may or may not survive doesn’t seem as poignant as a man who’s already under a medical death sentence. The character of Flämmchen, the secretary played by Joan Crawford in 1932, here is saddled with the silly name “Bunny Smith” and goes to Lana Turner — who’s impassive and bovine as usual, though she comes close enough to acting to register her dilemma over whether to become the mistress of financial speculator Martin X. Edley (Edward Arnold, taking over the part of Wallace Beery in Grand Hotel and also acting a role quite similar to the one he played opposite Joan Crawford in the 1934 film Chained), who in a dangerously Production Code-bending conception appears to want her not only as his own mistress but as a sexual favor he can bestow to any potential deal partners who require such perks to agree to put money into his schemes.
Edley is in the Waldorf to meet with the Bey of Aribajan (George Zucco), who throughout the film is in heavy makeup and a full Valentino-style burnoose (those were the days in which Arab leaders actually wore classy native outfits instead of that silly thing Yasir Arafat always wore that looked like he made it from a dish towel) and is pretending to be unable to speak a word of English. The gimmick is that in order to impress the Bey and his handlers — one of whom is played by the great British character actor Miles Mander, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as a director (The Pleasure Garden, 1925) and played the rich old man in Murder, My Sweet — and get them to give his oil company the rights to their country’s petroleum reserves (a plot line that makes this otherwise dated movie seem awfully contemporary!) Edley has falsely said that honest oil broker Jessup (Samuel S. Hinds, playing a character the cadaverous Tully Marshall portrayed in Grand Hotel) is a partner in the deal — which he isn’t. (This is the story Collyer was chasing after when he stumbled into Julie’s room by mistake.)
Like her predecessor in Grand Hotel, Bunny is torn between Edley’s offer to keep her in luxury in exchange for making her his all-purpose whore and Captain Hollis’s honest, sincere love for her and offer to settle down with her in his home town of Jasmine in the California desert if he makes it through his operation — and eventually she chooses love and poverty over wealth and sexual objectification, a good thing since when Jessup returns from his business trip on Monday morning he exposes Edley as a fraud and Edley is arrested. The Spewacks replaced the philosophical hotel doctor’s role as narrator with Robert Benchley, called “Randy Morton” but basically playing himself, a successful columnist who lives in the Waldorf permanently — and they did an interesting switcheroo on the original’s gimmick, in which doorman Jean Hersholt is impatiently awaiting news from the hospital where his wife is about to give birth to their child, and has Benchley fretting through the whole movie about his dog being in a veterinary hospital about to have her first litter of puppies. (A rather mangy-looking street dog passes in the opposite direction from Benchley’s leash-led purebred in an early scene and we’re clearly supposed to assume he’s the father.)
Weekend at the Waldorf is one of those portmanteau movies in which the filmmakers crammed just about every device they could think of into the script to ensure that there would be something in it to entertain every audience member — a far cry from the strategy of today, which is to tailor your film so narrowly to a specific niche that members of your target audience will flock to see it on opening weekend even if nobody else particularly cares for it at all — even to including Xavier Cugat and his orchestra, performing two songs. One is a ballad called “And There You Are,” ostensibly written by an old service buddy of Captain Hollis who was killed in action during the war (actually composed by Sammy Fain and Ted Koehler, both of whom were associated with much better songs than this), and the other is a full-dress production number on Pepe Guizár’s song “Guadalajara,” which also seems to be the song’s entire lyric. The ballad is done by Bob Graham, who doesn’t otherwise appear in the movie and was probably Cugat’s regular male singer; “Guadalajara” features a lead vocal by actress Lina Romay as “Juanita,” a stereotypically temperamental singer whom Cugat fires and then almost immediately rehires.
Overall, Weekend at the Waldorf is hardly in the same league as its original (let’s face it, though they’re all talented people Ginger Rogers, Walter Pidgeon and Van Johnson are major steps down from Garbo and the Barrymores!) but it’s still a fun film, what might be called a “comfort movie” in the sense of “comfort food.” It’s Grand Hotel with most of the sentiment (and sentimentality) preserved but all the tragedy meticulously taken out — the chilling scene in the original in which Wallace Beery murders John Barrymore by hitting him over the head with a telephone is left out here (though director Robert Z. Leonard gives us two extreme close-ups of telephones and puts doomy music under them, which probably only confused people who hadn’t seen the original Grand Hotel and led people who had to assume there would be another phone-related murder here) — and it’s also 15 minutes longer and not as well-paced — Leonard was a quite competent director (he’s never been one of my favorites, though I noticed that when Turner Classic Movies featured him as one of their 52 “Great Directors” showcased in June I recorded every movie of his they showed except for two I already had) but nowhere near Edmund Goulding either in atmospherics or in getting the most from his actors.
One thought that occurred to me after that big production number to “Guadalajara” was that as long as they were going to insert songs into it, maybe they should have gone whole hog and turned it into a full-dress musical, and cast Fred Astaire as Chip Collyer — it would have been a better reunion film for him and Rogers than their actual one, The Barkleys of Broadway. It also occurred to me that this was one black-and-white film from the classic era that should have been in color; the lavish settings would have glowed in three-strip Technicolor and color would have given this remake an appeal the original film didn’t have — but even this late MGM was surprisingly reticent about the extra expense involved in shooting in color and pretty much reserved it for musicals and historical spectacles.
I ran a “feature,” the 1945 MGM all-star film Week-End at the Waldorf (that antique spelling of “Week-End,” as two words with a hyphen between, is the one on the main title), a cleverly reworked remake of the 1932 film Grand Hotel with the locale changed from a fictitious hotel in Berlin to the real Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City (a second unit shot footage of the exterior of the real Waldorf and it was matched to studio sets in Hollywood) and the original script by Hans Kräly (based on the 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel by German writer Vicki Baum, her own German-language stage adaptation of it in 1930 and the English-language version adapted by William A. Drake and staged on Broadway later in 1930) is quite cleverly redone by Guy Bolton and Sam and Bella Spewack for an American setting in the immediate aftermath of World War II (the film was released in October 1945 but filmed while the war was still going on).
The Spewacks would shortly go on to do an even more creative reworking of an even more prestigious play — the musical Kiss Me, Kate, based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and paralleling the Shakespeare play with the real lives of the divorced couple who are starring in a production of it — and some of the same sensibility is apparent here. The on-the-way-down ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) becomes movie star Julie Malvern (Ginger Rogers), who’s just about to open her latest and most prestigious film at its New York premiere; and the Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore), a jewel thief who romances her to get access to her room but then finds himself falling genuinely in love with her, becomes war correspondent Chip Collyer (Walter Pidgeon), who when he stumbles into Julie’s room (whose entrance is disguised as the door to a supply room!) while chasing down a story involving the occupants of the room next door to hers — more on that later — and is mistaken for the jewel thief Julie’s maid Anna (Rosemary DeCamp) had previously warned her about, who we never see (we’re told during the movie that the real thief has been arrested elsewhere), and in what is only the second time I can recall in the history of filmmaking that a remake has directly referenced its original film, Chip starts trying to seduce Julie with some of John Barrymore’s dialogue and she recognizes it and says, “That’s Grand Hotel!” (The other film I’m aware of that pulled a similar trick was We’re Not Dressing, the 1934 Bing Crosby-Carole Lombard vehicle that was a remake of James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton — in which sailor Crosby, addressing the socialites whose yacht has run aground on a desert island and stranded them there, announces that he’s seen the previous film of this story, Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female, and he’s going to take over and assume the role of Crichton to ensure their survival.)
Kringelein, the terminally ill bookkeeper who comes to the Grand Hotel with his life’s savings determined to enjoy his final days to the hilt — so memorably played by Lionel Barrymore in the original Grand Hotel — here becomes Captain James Hollis (Van Johnson), a military pilot who’s on his way to Washington, D.C. for a delicate operation to remove some shrapnel inside him — an operation he’s told by the hotel doctor, Robert Campbell (Warner Anderson), that only has a 50 percent chance of success — and somehow a man who’s facing the prospect of an operation that he may or may not survive doesn’t seem as poignant as a man who’s already under a medical death sentence. The character of Flämmchen, the secretary played by Joan Crawford in 1932, here is saddled with the silly name “Bunny Smith” and goes to Lana Turner — who’s impassive and bovine as usual, though she comes close enough to acting to register her dilemma over whether to become the mistress of financial speculator Martin X. Edley (Edward Arnold, taking over the part of Wallace Beery in Grand Hotel and also acting a role quite similar to the one he played opposite Joan Crawford in the 1934 film Chained), who in a dangerously Production Code-bending conception appears to want her not only as his own mistress but as a sexual favor he can bestow to any potential deal partners who require such perks to agree to put money into his schemes.
Edley is in the Waldorf to meet with the Bey of Aribajan (George Zucco), who throughout the film is in heavy makeup and a full Valentino-style burnoose (those were the days in which Arab leaders actually wore classy native outfits instead of that silly thing Yasir Arafat always wore that looked like he made it from a dish towel) and is pretending to be unable to speak a word of English. The gimmick is that in order to impress the Bey and his handlers — one of whom is played by the great British character actor Miles Mander, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as a director (The Pleasure Garden, 1925) and played the rich old man in Murder, My Sweet — and get them to give his oil company the rights to their country’s petroleum reserves (a plot line that makes this otherwise dated movie seem awfully contemporary!) Edley has falsely said that honest oil broker Jessup (Samuel S. Hinds, playing a character the cadaverous Tully Marshall portrayed in Grand Hotel) is a partner in the deal — which he isn’t. (This is the story Collyer was chasing after when he stumbled into Julie’s room by mistake.)
Like her predecessor in Grand Hotel, Bunny is torn between Edley’s offer to keep her in luxury in exchange for making her his all-purpose whore and Captain Hollis’s honest, sincere love for her and offer to settle down with her in his home town of Jasmine in the California desert if he makes it through his operation — and eventually she chooses love and poverty over wealth and sexual objectification, a good thing since when Jessup returns from his business trip on Monday morning he exposes Edley as a fraud and Edley is arrested. The Spewacks replaced the philosophical hotel doctor’s role as narrator with Robert Benchley, called “Randy Morton” but basically playing himself, a successful columnist who lives in the Waldorf permanently — and they did an interesting switcheroo on the original’s gimmick, in which doorman Jean Hersholt is impatiently awaiting news from the hospital where his wife is about to give birth to their child, and has Benchley fretting through the whole movie about his dog being in a veterinary hospital about to have her first litter of puppies. (A rather mangy-looking street dog passes in the opposite direction from Benchley’s leash-led purebred in an early scene and we’re clearly supposed to assume he’s the father.)
Weekend at the Waldorf is one of those portmanteau movies in which the filmmakers crammed just about every device they could think of into the script to ensure that there would be something in it to entertain every audience member — a far cry from the strategy of today, which is to tailor your film so narrowly to a specific niche that members of your target audience will flock to see it on opening weekend even if nobody else particularly cares for it at all — even to including Xavier Cugat and his orchestra, performing two songs. One is a ballad called “And There You Are,” ostensibly written by an old service buddy of Captain Hollis who was killed in action during the war (actually composed by Sammy Fain and Ted Koehler, both of whom were associated with much better songs than this), and the other is a full-dress production number on Pepe Guizár’s song “Guadalajara,” which also seems to be the song’s entire lyric. The ballad is done by Bob Graham, who doesn’t otherwise appear in the movie and was probably Cugat’s regular male singer; “Guadalajara” features a lead vocal by actress Lina Romay as “Juanita,” a stereotypically temperamental singer whom Cugat fires and then almost immediately rehires.
Overall, Weekend at the Waldorf is hardly in the same league as its original (let’s face it, though they’re all talented people Ginger Rogers, Walter Pidgeon and Van Johnson are major steps down from Garbo and the Barrymores!) but it’s still a fun film, what might be called a “comfort movie” in the sense of “comfort food.” It’s Grand Hotel with most of the sentiment (and sentimentality) preserved but all the tragedy meticulously taken out — the chilling scene in the original in which Wallace Beery murders John Barrymore by hitting him over the head with a telephone is left out here (though director Robert Z. Leonard gives us two extreme close-ups of telephones and puts doomy music under them, which probably only confused people who hadn’t seen the original Grand Hotel and led people who had to assume there would be another phone-related murder here) — and it’s also 15 minutes longer and not as well-paced — Leonard was a quite competent director (he’s never been one of my favorites, though I noticed that when Turner Classic Movies featured him as one of their 52 “Great Directors” showcased in June I recorded every movie of his they showed except for two I already had) but nowhere near Edmund Goulding either in atmospherics or in getting the most from his actors.
One thought that occurred to me after that big production number to “Guadalajara” was that as long as they were going to insert songs into it, maybe they should have gone whole hog and turned it into a full-dress musical, and cast Fred Astaire as Chip Collyer — it would have been a better reunion film for him and Rogers than their actual one, The Barkleys of Broadway. It also occurred to me that this was one black-and-white film from the classic era that should have been in color; the lavish settings would have glowed in three-strip Technicolor and color would have given this remake an appeal the original film didn’t have — but even this late MGM was surprisingly reticent about the extra expense involved in shooting in color and pretty much reserved it for musicals and historical spectacles.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
The Divorcée (MGM, 1930)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
One was The Divorcée, a 1930 MGM potboiler that inexplicably won Norma Shearer the Academy Award for Best Actress, in which she and Chester Morris played a couple who attempted what would now be called an “open relationship,” divorced when he couldn’t handle the thought of his wife seeing other men even though he was seeing other women, then got back together at the fade-out. It was typical Hollywood tripe, based on a novel by Ursula Parrott called Ex-Wife, adapted for the screen by Zelda Sears, Nick Grindé and John Meehan and directed to his usual level of mediocrity by Robert Z. Leonard.
The following year Shearer and Robert Montgomery (who had a supporting role in The Divorcée) would play this kind of story deliciously in Private Lives, but Noël Coward was a far better writer than Ursula Parrott; Hans Kraly, Claudine West and Richard Schayer were also superior to Sears, Grindé and Meehan; and Sidney Franklin a much better director than Leonard. Also, Coward’s story had played the situation for sophisticated comedy while Parrott’s was oh-so-serious about it — and Shearer’s performance, though not as ludicrously stylized as some of her work, was bland and hardly what one would consider Oscar-caliber today (of the movies of hers I’ve seen, I think The Women offers her best work — her performance in it tends to get overshadowed by the bravura playing of Joan Crawford as the bitch, but Shearer is quite affecting in the role of the wife betrayed as much by her gossipy friends as her straying husband). — 3/28/98
•••••
I picked out a relatively short movie: The Divorcée, the 1930 romantic melodrama which starred Norma Shearer and three, count ’em, three leading men: Chester Morris, Conrad Nagel and Robert Montgomery. It’s one of those movies about the affluent — though at least most of the people in this movie actually have jobs, which automatically sets them apart from most people in movies, especially MGM movies about rich people, in 1930 — and their cavalier, to say the least, attitudes about marriage, fidelity, commitment and divorce.
Based on a novel called Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (yet another pop writer whose works got filmed in Hollywood’s classic era whose name otherwise means nothing to me) and scripted by the usual conglomeration of talents for an early talkie — Nick Grindé and Zelda Sears, “treatment,” and John Meehan, “dialogue and continuity” — and directed by Robert Z. Leonard (though in typical MGM fashion for the time he’s not credited as such; instead, a small line of type on the same card as the main title identifies the film as “A Robert Z. Leonard Production,” which confused the major-domos at imdb.com into listing them on their site as producer, not director), The Divorcée is a titillating but ultimately moralistic saga about Jerry (Norma Shearer), who as the film begins has never been married herself but hangs out and goes to parties and nightclubs with a batch of picturesquely decadent people including Paul (Conrad Nagel), Don (Robert Montgomery), Paul’s girlfriend Dot (Helen Johnson), the much-divorced Helen (Florence Eldridge — making a surprise appearance in a film that doesn’t feature her real-life long-term husband, actor Fredric March) and her current hot squeeze, Bill Baldwin (Robert Elliott).
Into the mix comes aspiring journalist Ted Martin (Chester Morris, acting with his usual power and authority and blowing away every other male in the cast); he and Jerry fall hard for each other and eventually get married, but not before the principals have been involved in a disastrous auto accident because Paul insisted on driving while drunk; his car veered off the road and the other people were relatively unscathed, but Dot was permanently disfigured and for the rest of the movie is seen either in bandages or with an elaborate hood over her head that makes her look like a cross between a Ku Klux Klansman and a burka-clad Muslim woman. There’s a fascinating sequence that counterpoints the wedding of Jerry and Ted (in a church, with the full nine yards of ceremony) and that of Paul and Dot (in Dot’s hospital room).
Alas, first Ted drifts into an affair, or at least a one-night stand, with Helen — whom he apparently dated at some previous point and who still wants him — and figuring that what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, Jerry has her own one-night trick with Don (a pretty unconvincing pairing because Montgomery is so young and gawky here he looks like he just got out of high school — it’s hard to believe from this film that just the next year Montgomery and Shearer were able to play a far more sophisticated version of this basic situation in the film of Noël Coward’s Private Lives) and then goes into a guilt-ridden tizzy when Ted returns from his business trip.
This leads to the breakup of their marriage and Jerry’s inexplicable rebound affair with Paul — a more romantically credible actor might have made this part believable, but Conrad Nagel looks like both his makeup and his hair have been plastered on his head with a trowel and he’s the same stuffed-shirt egomaniac he usually played — even though that means Paul will have to divorce Dot, which he thinks she’ll accept if he gives her a financial settlement. (His callousness towards her is only the most blatant indication of what an unscrupulous rotter he really is.) At this point the action of the film, which heretofore has taken place entirely in the United States, gets peripatetic as Paul offers to take Jerry on his company’s assignment of him to Japan as soon as he dumps Dot and is able to marry her, while she gets a competing offer from her own employer to set up a branch in London (we get the impression she’s a fashion designer, though about our only clue in that direction is scene in which she’s shown sketching a female figure on a giant pad), and the final scene takes place in Paris where Ted, who’s lost his own job and is making his living free-lancing (an American journalist free-lancing in a country with a different language?), is hanging out in the hope of getting in touch with her, and eventually they re-meet on New Year’s Eve (which is used symbolically much the way Woody Allen would use it in Whatever Works nearly eight decades later!), reconcile and decide that in Ted and Jerry 2.0 they’re going to take a far less cavalier attitude towards monogamy and fidelity than they did in 1.0.
Technically, The Divorcée is quite a good film for the period; Robert Z. Leonard had a hack reputation (though he made at least one masterpiece, the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy film Maytime) but here he’s in the forefront of early-talkie directors in terms of moving the camera, shooting from angles that involve the viewer in the action instead of merely broadcasting it from a safe distance, and allowing the actors to say their lines relatively naturalistically instead of the s-l-o-w, p-o-n-d-e-r-o-u-s readings forced on many more complaisant early-talkie directors by the sound engineers. (The fact that the film’s sound engineer happened to be the leading lady’s brother, Douglas Shearer, may have had something to do with the fact that she was able to act her lines instead of intone them.)
Where the film falls short is in the arbitrary nature of its plotting; The Divorcée is one of those movies whose didactic agenda is all too clear — titillate the audience by hinting at alternatives to monogamy and sexual exclusivity in relationships, then slam the door on them with a forceful and even ferocious re-assertion of traditional morality at the end. Norma Shearer’s performance hangs up on just this dichotomy; she’s marvelous in the silent scene in which she has to face the return of her husband the morning after she’s cheated on him, stiff and unconvincing in the later dialogue when she has to become the don’t-do-what-I-have-done spokesperson for Production Code morality (though her tirades probably wowed the Academy voters back in 1930). The subtlety with which Friedrich Murnau and Carl Mayer brought their similarly straying marital partners back together in Sunrise totally eludes the makers of this film — and yet on its own terms The Divorcée is quite good, (mostly) understated and with characters who aren’t really heroes or villains but ordinary human beings with ordinary human weaknesses.
It was surprising, though, to read on imdb.com that Norma Shearer asked for this part because she wanted to get away from the goody-two-shoes roles she’d been stuck with in her silents — which seemed strange since she’d got to play far more interesting and morally ambiguous characters than this in her 1925 silent Lady of the Night (in that one she played a dual role, gooder-than-good Florence Banning and good-bad girl Mary Helmer, and while her Florence was a typically dull Shearer characterization her Mary was superb) and her 1928 film A Lady of Chance (also directed by Robert Z. Leonard, in which she’s part of a gang of con artists redeemed when she falls genuinely in love with her latest “mark,” played with his usual woodenness by Johnny Mack Brown). As it stands, The Divorcée is a fascinating movie, alternately oppressive and genuinely moving, with some of its emotional dilemmas seeming very, very dated while others would ring true in a film made today. — 7/2/09
One was The Divorcée, a 1930 MGM potboiler that inexplicably won Norma Shearer the Academy Award for Best Actress, in which she and Chester Morris played a couple who attempted what would now be called an “open relationship,” divorced when he couldn’t handle the thought of his wife seeing other men even though he was seeing other women, then got back together at the fade-out. It was typical Hollywood tripe, based on a novel by Ursula Parrott called Ex-Wife, adapted for the screen by Zelda Sears, Nick Grindé and John Meehan and directed to his usual level of mediocrity by Robert Z. Leonard.
The following year Shearer and Robert Montgomery (who had a supporting role in The Divorcée) would play this kind of story deliciously in Private Lives, but Noël Coward was a far better writer than Ursula Parrott; Hans Kraly, Claudine West and Richard Schayer were also superior to Sears, Grindé and Meehan; and Sidney Franklin a much better director than Leonard. Also, Coward’s story had played the situation for sophisticated comedy while Parrott’s was oh-so-serious about it — and Shearer’s performance, though not as ludicrously stylized as some of her work, was bland and hardly what one would consider Oscar-caliber today (of the movies of hers I’ve seen, I think The Women offers her best work — her performance in it tends to get overshadowed by the bravura playing of Joan Crawford as the bitch, but Shearer is quite affecting in the role of the wife betrayed as much by her gossipy friends as her straying husband). — 3/28/98
•••••
I picked out a relatively short movie: The Divorcée, the 1930 romantic melodrama which starred Norma Shearer and three, count ’em, three leading men: Chester Morris, Conrad Nagel and Robert Montgomery. It’s one of those movies about the affluent — though at least most of the people in this movie actually have jobs, which automatically sets them apart from most people in movies, especially MGM movies about rich people, in 1930 — and their cavalier, to say the least, attitudes about marriage, fidelity, commitment and divorce.
Based on a novel called Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (yet another pop writer whose works got filmed in Hollywood’s classic era whose name otherwise means nothing to me) and scripted by the usual conglomeration of talents for an early talkie — Nick Grindé and Zelda Sears, “treatment,” and John Meehan, “dialogue and continuity” — and directed by Robert Z. Leonard (though in typical MGM fashion for the time he’s not credited as such; instead, a small line of type on the same card as the main title identifies the film as “A Robert Z. Leonard Production,” which confused the major-domos at imdb.com into listing them on their site as producer, not director), The Divorcée is a titillating but ultimately moralistic saga about Jerry (Norma Shearer), who as the film begins has never been married herself but hangs out and goes to parties and nightclubs with a batch of picturesquely decadent people including Paul (Conrad Nagel), Don (Robert Montgomery), Paul’s girlfriend Dot (Helen Johnson), the much-divorced Helen (Florence Eldridge — making a surprise appearance in a film that doesn’t feature her real-life long-term husband, actor Fredric March) and her current hot squeeze, Bill Baldwin (Robert Elliott).
Into the mix comes aspiring journalist Ted Martin (Chester Morris, acting with his usual power and authority and blowing away every other male in the cast); he and Jerry fall hard for each other and eventually get married, but not before the principals have been involved in a disastrous auto accident because Paul insisted on driving while drunk; his car veered off the road and the other people were relatively unscathed, but Dot was permanently disfigured and for the rest of the movie is seen either in bandages or with an elaborate hood over her head that makes her look like a cross between a Ku Klux Klansman and a burka-clad Muslim woman. There’s a fascinating sequence that counterpoints the wedding of Jerry and Ted (in a church, with the full nine yards of ceremony) and that of Paul and Dot (in Dot’s hospital room).
Alas, first Ted drifts into an affair, or at least a one-night stand, with Helen — whom he apparently dated at some previous point and who still wants him — and figuring that what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, Jerry has her own one-night trick with Don (a pretty unconvincing pairing because Montgomery is so young and gawky here he looks like he just got out of high school — it’s hard to believe from this film that just the next year Montgomery and Shearer were able to play a far more sophisticated version of this basic situation in the film of Noël Coward’s Private Lives) and then goes into a guilt-ridden tizzy when Ted returns from his business trip.
This leads to the breakup of their marriage and Jerry’s inexplicable rebound affair with Paul — a more romantically credible actor might have made this part believable, but Conrad Nagel looks like both his makeup and his hair have been plastered on his head with a trowel and he’s the same stuffed-shirt egomaniac he usually played — even though that means Paul will have to divorce Dot, which he thinks she’ll accept if he gives her a financial settlement. (His callousness towards her is only the most blatant indication of what an unscrupulous rotter he really is.) At this point the action of the film, which heretofore has taken place entirely in the United States, gets peripatetic as Paul offers to take Jerry on his company’s assignment of him to Japan as soon as he dumps Dot and is able to marry her, while she gets a competing offer from her own employer to set up a branch in London (we get the impression she’s a fashion designer, though about our only clue in that direction is scene in which she’s shown sketching a female figure on a giant pad), and the final scene takes place in Paris where Ted, who’s lost his own job and is making his living free-lancing (an American journalist free-lancing in a country with a different language?), is hanging out in the hope of getting in touch with her, and eventually they re-meet on New Year’s Eve (which is used symbolically much the way Woody Allen would use it in Whatever Works nearly eight decades later!), reconcile and decide that in Ted and Jerry 2.0 they’re going to take a far less cavalier attitude towards monogamy and fidelity than they did in 1.0.
Technically, The Divorcée is quite a good film for the period; Robert Z. Leonard had a hack reputation (though he made at least one masterpiece, the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy film Maytime) but here he’s in the forefront of early-talkie directors in terms of moving the camera, shooting from angles that involve the viewer in the action instead of merely broadcasting it from a safe distance, and allowing the actors to say their lines relatively naturalistically instead of the s-l-o-w, p-o-n-d-e-r-o-u-s readings forced on many more complaisant early-talkie directors by the sound engineers. (The fact that the film’s sound engineer happened to be the leading lady’s brother, Douglas Shearer, may have had something to do with the fact that she was able to act her lines instead of intone them.)
Where the film falls short is in the arbitrary nature of its plotting; The Divorcée is one of those movies whose didactic agenda is all too clear — titillate the audience by hinting at alternatives to monogamy and sexual exclusivity in relationships, then slam the door on them with a forceful and even ferocious re-assertion of traditional morality at the end. Norma Shearer’s performance hangs up on just this dichotomy; she’s marvelous in the silent scene in which she has to face the return of her husband the morning after she’s cheated on him, stiff and unconvincing in the later dialogue when she has to become the don’t-do-what-I-have-done spokesperson for Production Code morality (though her tirades probably wowed the Academy voters back in 1930). The subtlety with which Friedrich Murnau and Carl Mayer brought their similarly straying marital partners back together in Sunrise totally eludes the makers of this film — and yet on its own terms The Divorcée is quite good, (mostly) understated and with characters who aren’t really heroes or villains but ordinary human beings with ordinary human weaknesses.
It was surprising, though, to read on imdb.com that Norma Shearer asked for this part because she wanted to get away from the goody-two-shoes roles she’d been stuck with in her silents — which seemed strange since she’d got to play far more interesting and morally ambiguous characters than this in her 1925 silent Lady of the Night (in that one she played a dual role, gooder-than-good Florence Banning and good-bad girl Mary Helmer, and while her Florence was a typically dull Shearer characterization her Mary was superb) and her 1928 film A Lady of Chance (also directed by Robert Z. Leonard, in which she’s part of a gang of con artists redeemed when she falls genuinely in love with her latest “mark,” played with his usual woodenness by Johnny Mack Brown). As it stands, The Divorcée is a fascinating movie, alternately oppressive and genuinely moving, with some of its emotional dilemmas seeming very, very dated while others would ring true in a film made today. — 7/2/09
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
For the Bible Tells Me So (Atticus Group, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was For the Bible Tells Me So, a chilling and moving 2007 documentary about the clash between religion and so-called “family values” versus real family values in the case of parents of Queer children. It’s not an especially fresh subject for drama, either documentary or narrative film — at least two PBS documentaries have already traveled the same path, as well as the surprisingly good Lifetime TV-movie Prayers for Bobby, in which (as does Mary Lou Wallner in this film) a mother drives away her Queer child (a Gay man in Prayers for Bobby, a Lesbian in For the Bible Tells Me So) with a religiously-driven negative reaction to his/her sexuality, then feels guilt-ridden when their Queer child commits suicide and does what she should have done while her kid was still alive: read up on the subject, change her mind and ultimately become a Queer-rights activist.
Though it was in the works before that, For the Bible Tells Me So was inspired by a 2006 protest in Colorado Springs at the headquarters of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family (a loathsome organization that when it’s not bashing Queers and telling their parents they need “reparative therapy” is advocating a really vicious “dare to discipline” attitude towards child-rearing including frequent use of corporal punishment — it’s a wonder any kids raised by parents who follow Dobson’s advice, even the straight ones, end up at all well-adjusted and happy!) and all but one of the families profiled came from people who were involved in that protest. That one was African-American minister couple David and Brenda Poteat (that’s a real name!) and their Lesbian daughter Tonia, included because the film’s director,Daniel Karslake, insisted on having at least one family of color in the mix.
Some of the people in the movie are celebrities — including the controversial Episcopal bishop W. Gene Robinson, the first openly Gay (and sexually active) bishop consecrated by any diocese in the Anglican communion (an act that is still splitting the church apart, as conservative churches and even entire dioceses in the U.S. seek to split off from a U.S. church that countenanced something so “anti-Biblical” and re-affiliate themselves under the supervision of culturally conservative churches in Africa) as well as Chrissy Gephardt and her father, former U.S. Congressmember and Presidential candidate Dick Gephardt. Watching this film was an intense experience for me even though it left me (as usual with writings or movies on this subject) with a profoundly mixed bag of emotions — torn between loving the people who were gradually able to get over their Bible-fueled prejudices and love their children as God, nature, nurture or whatever made them and hating not only the particular religious prejudices that had led them to reject their kids in the first place but the very idea of religion, period.
I grew up in a free-thought home and never set foot in a church until I was well into adulthood — and, I must say, always looked down (and to an extent still do!) on people who believe in all the old superstitions of the Bible and its rival religions simply because they can’t accept the reality of their own deaths and therefore need to believe in a fantasy of immortality as the next best to the real thing. (I can’t see any other reason for the persistence of religious belief, including its appearance in otherwise intelligent and even brilliant people — though I must say that watching a movie like this gives me empathy for the importance other people attach to religion, spirituality and God even while simultaneously angering me about the depths of misery to which that can lead a person who finds out he or she is the “wrong” sort of human being to be accepted as fully righteous and legitimately human in that particular religious tradition.)
The storyline of Mary Lou Wallner and her late daughter Anna — particularly the letters that passed back and forth between them, Anna’s written in longhand in purple ink on lined paper and her mother’s typed precisely because only by depersonalizing it through the machine could she write it at all; Anna’s talking about love and emotional struggle and her mom’s using the condemnatory language she’d heard in church and read in black and white on the pages of the Bible — is not surprisingly the most moving and wrenchingly tragic in the film; the story of Jake Reitan and his parents, Phil and Randy, serves as a sort of counterpoint as they not only get off the anti-Queer judgmental soapbox in time to accept their son before he gets near suicide but ultimately the three Reitans become the first to break the line at Colorado Springs and get arrested in an act of civil disobedience against Dobson’s pustulent organization (the folks who brought us Proposition 8, by the way; the initiative’s principal author and spokesperson, Ron Prentice — whom I tried and failed to get an interview with, by the way — is the California organizer for Focus on the Family and it was in that capacity that he pushed Proposition 8 to the ballot and fended off the activities of a rival Christian-Right group who wanted a more far-reaching measure that would invalidate domestic partnerships and civil unions as well).
I could have asked for more nuance in the movie, less of a dichotomy between “Gay” and “straight” in its assessment of the dramatis personae — after all, W. Gene Robinson was married for some time and had children; and Chrissy Gephardt was also married to a man when she met Anna (a different Anna), the woman who brought her out and who identified herself as dating both women and men — yes, that’s right, in this film as well as in so much other discourse in the Queer community it is bisexuality that is the love that dare not speak its name — and I had mixed feelings about the bizarre cartoon sequence in the middle. It’s done in a deliberate parody of 1950’s “educational” movies and it’s a rather heavy-handed scene in which a homophobe named “Christian” who’s drawn like a grown-up version of Charlie Brown (complete with a zig-zag pattern across the front of his T-shirt) meets a Gay man named “George” and a Lesbian named “Martha” (I’d have liked to know if the use of the names of the famously squabbling straight couple in Gay playwright Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was deliberate) and also hears from a voice-of-God narrator (played by the late Don LaFontaine, one of the leading narrators of movie trailers) reciting statistics, studies and scientific authorities that refute the common assumptions about homosexuality.
Director Karslake was uncomfortable enough with this scene that he almost cut it out of the film and only restored it after a trial screening for three straight Christian couples, from Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, at Manhattan’s General Theological Seminary. “The first thing they all mentioned was how much they loved the cartoon, how it gave the film some much needed comic relief, and how much they learned from it,” Karslake said. (At the same time I can’t help but be concerned about the whole idea that scientific “fact” should be determined by popular vote; the American Psychological Association only decided that homosexuality is not a mental illness in 1974, and if for some reason they should reverse themselves and decide that it is again, would that make it true?) One of the film’s executive producers is Michael Huffington, the famous Republican challenger to Senator Dianne Feinstein (who came close to defeating her) who later broke up with his wife Arianna and announced that while he didn’t want to label himself “Gay,” the fact was he’d rather date men; another executive producer, Robert Greenbaum, showed up last night and fielded a few questions (too few, since there was another event in the room right afterwards — a comedy night — and the audience for that was lined up outside clamoring to get in), making the recommendation that people look on the Web for lists of famous Gay and Lesbian people throughout history … and, being the sort of person I am (an inveterate troublemaker even in sympathetic settings!) I spoke up and said most of the so-called “famous Gay and Lesbian people throughout history” that appear on those lists were in fact Bisexual.
As I’ve said before, as a community we’re going through the motions of inclusion with that horrible acronym “LGBT people” but aren’t facing up to the fundamental changes in Queer ideology that would be necessary to incorporate the reality of Bisexual and Transgender people and how their existence challenges the shibboleth that sexual orientations and gender identities are either genetically determined or fixed early on in childhood. For the Bible Tells Me So rightly condemns the so-called “reparative therapy” programs pushed on Queer people and their families by the religious Right and the churches affiliated with it (to the point where conservative churches and their ministers outright tell parents not to accept their Queer kids on the “tough-love” assumption that disapproval from their parents will push them into reparative-therapy programs to seek to be “cured”) but it also buys into the “born that way” notion and, like a lot of other pro-Queer material, profiles people like W. Gene Robinson and Chrissy Gephardt who changed from leading straight lives to Gay or Lesbian ones without acknowledging the possibility that that might also work in the other direction: that a person might live in a same-sex sexual lifestyle and behavior pattern and then spontaneously shift to an opposite-sex one based on their own changes and the people around them (including simply meeting and falling in love with a person of the other gender). We’re right to condemn the use of religious dogma to force people into attempts to change their sexual orientation, but we’re wrong to assume that the Queer-to-straight progression in those who make it on their own, for their own reasons, is somehow less legitimate, less honest, less real than the straight-to-Queer one.
The film was For the Bible Tells Me So, a chilling and moving 2007 documentary about the clash between religion and so-called “family values” versus real family values in the case of parents of Queer children. It’s not an especially fresh subject for drama, either documentary or narrative film — at least two PBS documentaries have already traveled the same path, as well as the surprisingly good Lifetime TV-movie Prayers for Bobby, in which (as does Mary Lou Wallner in this film) a mother drives away her Queer child (a Gay man in Prayers for Bobby, a Lesbian in For the Bible Tells Me So) with a religiously-driven negative reaction to his/her sexuality, then feels guilt-ridden when their Queer child commits suicide and does what she should have done while her kid was still alive: read up on the subject, change her mind and ultimately become a Queer-rights activist.
Though it was in the works before that, For the Bible Tells Me So was inspired by a 2006 protest in Colorado Springs at the headquarters of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family (a loathsome organization that when it’s not bashing Queers and telling their parents they need “reparative therapy” is advocating a really vicious “dare to discipline” attitude towards child-rearing including frequent use of corporal punishment — it’s a wonder any kids raised by parents who follow Dobson’s advice, even the straight ones, end up at all well-adjusted and happy!) and all but one of the families profiled came from people who were involved in that protest. That one was African-American minister couple David and Brenda Poteat (that’s a real name!) and their Lesbian daughter Tonia, included because the film’s director,Daniel Karslake, insisted on having at least one family of color in the mix.
Some of the people in the movie are celebrities — including the controversial Episcopal bishop W. Gene Robinson, the first openly Gay (and sexually active) bishop consecrated by any diocese in the Anglican communion (an act that is still splitting the church apart, as conservative churches and even entire dioceses in the U.S. seek to split off from a U.S. church that countenanced something so “anti-Biblical” and re-affiliate themselves under the supervision of culturally conservative churches in Africa) as well as Chrissy Gephardt and her father, former U.S. Congressmember and Presidential candidate Dick Gephardt. Watching this film was an intense experience for me even though it left me (as usual with writings or movies on this subject) with a profoundly mixed bag of emotions — torn between loving the people who were gradually able to get over their Bible-fueled prejudices and love their children as God, nature, nurture or whatever made them and hating not only the particular religious prejudices that had led them to reject their kids in the first place but the very idea of religion, period.
I grew up in a free-thought home and never set foot in a church until I was well into adulthood — and, I must say, always looked down (and to an extent still do!) on people who believe in all the old superstitions of the Bible and its rival religions simply because they can’t accept the reality of their own deaths and therefore need to believe in a fantasy of immortality as the next best to the real thing. (I can’t see any other reason for the persistence of religious belief, including its appearance in otherwise intelligent and even brilliant people — though I must say that watching a movie like this gives me empathy for the importance other people attach to religion, spirituality and God even while simultaneously angering me about the depths of misery to which that can lead a person who finds out he or she is the “wrong” sort of human being to be accepted as fully righteous and legitimately human in that particular religious tradition.)
The storyline of Mary Lou Wallner and her late daughter Anna — particularly the letters that passed back and forth between them, Anna’s written in longhand in purple ink on lined paper and her mother’s typed precisely because only by depersonalizing it through the machine could she write it at all; Anna’s talking about love and emotional struggle and her mom’s using the condemnatory language she’d heard in church and read in black and white on the pages of the Bible — is not surprisingly the most moving and wrenchingly tragic in the film; the story of Jake Reitan and his parents, Phil and Randy, serves as a sort of counterpoint as they not only get off the anti-Queer judgmental soapbox in time to accept their son before he gets near suicide but ultimately the three Reitans become the first to break the line at Colorado Springs and get arrested in an act of civil disobedience against Dobson’s pustulent organization (the folks who brought us Proposition 8, by the way; the initiative’s principal author and spokesperson, Ron Prentice — whom I tried and failed to get an interview with, by the way — is the California organizer for Focus on the Family and it was in that capacity that he pushed Proposition 8 to the ballot and fended off the activities of a rival Christian-Right group who wanted a more far-reaching measure that would invalidate domestic partnerships and civil unions as well).
I could have asked for more nuance in the movie, less of a dichotomy between “Gay” and “straight” in its assessment of the dramatis personae — after all, W. Gene Robinson was married for some time and had children; and Chrissy Gephardt was also married to a man when she met Anna (a different Anna), the woman who brought her out and who identified herself as dating both women and men — yes, that’s right, in this film as well as in so much other discourse in the Queer community it is bisexuality that is the love that dare not speak its name — and I had mixed feelings about the bizarre cartoon sequence in the middle. It’s done in a deliberate parody of 1950’s “educational” movies and it’s a rather heavy-handed scene in which a homophobe named “Christian” who’s drawn like a grown-up version of Charlie Brown (complete with a zig-zag pattern across the front of his T-shirt) meets a Gay man named “George” and a Lesbian named “Martha” (I’d have liked to know if the use of the names of the famously squabbling straight couple in Gay playwright Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was deliberate) and also hears from a voice-of-God narrator (played by the late Don LaFontaine, one of the leading narrators of movie trailers) reciting statistics, studies and scientific authorities that refute the common assumptions about homosexuality.
Director Karslake was uncomfortable enough with this scene that he almost cut it out of the film and only restored it after a trial screening for three straight Christian couples, from Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, at Manhattan’s General Theological Seminary. “The first thing they all mentioned was how much they loved the cartoon, how it gave the film some much needed comic relief, and how much they learned from it,” Karslake said. (At the same time I can’t help but be concerned about the whole idea that scientific “fact” should be determined by popular vote; the American Psychological Association only decided that homosexuality is not a mental illness in 1974, and if for some reason they should reverse themselves and decide that it is again, would that make it true?) One of the film’s executive producers is Michael Huffington, the famous Republican challenger to Senator Dianne Feinstein (who came close to defeating her) who later broke up with his wife Arianna and announced that while he didn’t want to label himself “Gay,” the fact was he’d rather date men; another executive producer, Robert Greenbaum, showed up last night and fielded a few questions (too few, since there was another event in the room right afterwards — a comedy night — and the audience for that was lined up outside clamoring to get in), making the recommendation that people look on the Web for lists of famous Gay and Lesbian people throughout history … and, being the sort of person I am (an inveterate troublemaker even in sympathetic settings!) I spoke up and said most of the so-called “famous Gay and Lesbian people throughout history” that appear on those lists were in fact Bisexual.
As I’ve said before, as a community we’re going through the motions of inclusion with that horrible acronym “LGBT people” but aren’t facing up to the fundamental changes in Queer ideology that would be necessary to incorporate the reality of Bisexual and Transgender people and how their existence challenges the shibboleth that sexual orientations and gender identities are either genetically determined or fixed early on in childhood. For the Bible Tells Me So rightly condemns the so-called “reparative therapy” programs pushed on Queer people and their families by the religious Right and the churches affiliated with it (to the point where conservative churches and their ministers outright tell parents not to accept their Queer kids on the “tough-love” assumption that disapproval from their parents will push them into reparative-therapy programs to seek to be “cured”) but it also buys into the “born that way” notion and, like a lot of other pro-Queer material, profiles people like W. Gene Robinson and Chrissy Gephardt who changed from leading straight lives to Gay or Lesbian ones without acknowledging the possibility that that might also work in the other direction: that a person might live in a same-sex sexual lifestyle and behavior pattern and then spontaneously shift to an opposite-sex one based on their own changes and the people around them (including simply meeting and falling in love with a person of the other gender). We’re right to condemn the use of religious dogma to force people into attempts to change their sexual orientation, but we’re wrong to assume that the Queer-to-straight progression in those who make it on their own, for their own reasons, is somehow less legitimate, less honest, less real than the straight-to-Queer one.
The Astral Factor (Invisible Strangler) (Jordan/Lyon Productions, 1976)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided to pick another entry from the two discs Charles downloaded (five movies each) from the 50 Sci-Fi Classics collection online since we’d had good luck with the one we’d watched the night before, Bride of the Gorilla. Mistake! The movie we ended up watching was The Astral Factor, also known (and listed on imdb.com) as Invisible Strangler, a 95-minute made-for-TV loser from 1976 in which a cute blond prisoner, Roger Sands (Frank Ashmore), suddenly develops the ability to make himself invisible and practice telekinesis (i.e., moving objects about without touching them) by sheer mental energy.
He uses this skill first to intimidate, and nearly murder, a Black fellow con and then, more reasonably, to escape (he’s able to get the prison doors to open themselves and the keys to move through mid-air and lock the guards in the cells, while he himself becomes invisible and uses that power to sneak out of the prison), and afterwards to resume the career as a serial killer of women that got him into prison in the first place. (The official synopsis for the film says that he acquired these abilities through acquiring books on paranormal phenomena from the prison library and using them to train himself in the techniques; though we see a cache of books spill on the floor of his cell, this is otherwise not made clear or even hinted at in the film itself.)
The cast list is a bit more impressive than the norm for these sorts of productions; the top-billed actor is Robert Foxworth, playing Lt. Charles Barrett, the lead investigator for the police in their efforts to catch the guy (he’s not bad looking, though the honor of best-looking male in the film is a split decision between Ashmore as the invisible psycho and Mark Slade as Det. Holt, who’s supposed to be Barrett’s goofus assistant but seems pretty competent to me); his wife is played by future Hart to Hart star Stefanie Powers; Elke Sommer and Cesare Danova are listed as “guest stars”; and one of the victims is Sue Lyon, who must have regarded this role as a major comedown after having worked for Stanley Kubrick on Lolita 14 years earlier!
But it’s one of those movies that not only is boring in and of itself (the screenplay was by Arthur C. Pierce based on an “original” story by Earle Lyon, and the director of record was John Florea, though according to imdb.com he had uncredited help at the helm from writer Pierce and Gene Fowler, Jr.) but also sucks off too many other truly great movies, notably the 1933 classic The Invisible Man. I wondered how John Florea and company were able to direct the women who play the victims of the invisible strangler — and in particular how they got them to pantomime being strangled by an invisible assailant — but then I wondered the same thing about James Whale working with Walter Brennan, Una O’Connor and the other great character actors who ran afoul of his invisible psycho.
The filmmakers even had the chutzpah to steal the marvelous scene in the Whale film in which the carefully laid plans to ambush the Invisible Man in the home of a person he’s threatened to kill are undone by a stray cat climbing the wall around the victim’s home and triggering the trap — only in this movie, instead of a cat, it’s two stray birds. Lyon and Pierce also steal from another genuine classic, Psycho, in having the villain be a young man who first murdered his mother and then fell under her spell, committing further murders in the illusion that his new victims are also his mother and he’s punishing her once again for having abandoned him (shown in black-and-white flashbacks the filmmakers prove utterly incapable of integrating into the main action with anything remotely resembling credibility or continuity). I don’t remember seeing this film on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 list, but it certainly would have deserved their “treatment”!
I decided to pick another entry from the two discs Charles downloaded (five movies each) from the 50 Sci-Fi Classics collection online since we’d had good luck with the one we’d watched the night before, Bride of the Gorilla. Mistake! The movie we ended up watching was The Astral Factor, also known (and listed on imdb.com) as Invisible Strangler, a 95-minute made-for-TV loser from 1976 in which a cute blond prisoner, Roger Sands (Frank Ashmore), suddenly develops the ability to make himself invisible and practice telekinesis (i.e., moving objects about without touching them) by sheer mental energy.
He uses this skill first to intimidate, and nearly murder, a Black fellow con and then, more reasonably, to escape (he’s able to get the prison doors to open themselves and the keys to move through mid-air and lock the guards in the cells, while he himself becomes invisible and uses that power to sneak out of the prison), and afterwards to resume the career as a serial killer of women that got him into prison in the first place. (The official synopsis for the film says that he acquired these abilities through acquiring books on paranormal phenomena from the prison library and using them to train himself in the techniques; though we see a cache of books spill on the floor of his cell, this is otherwise not made clear or even hinted at in the film itself.)
The cast list is a bit more impressive than the norm for these sorts of productions; the top-billed actor is Robert Foxworth, playing Lt. Charles Barrett, the lead investigator for the police in their efforts to catch the guy (he’s not bad looking, though the honor of best-looking male in the film is a split decision between Ashmore as the invisible psycho and Mark Slade as Det. Holt, who’s supposed to be Barrett’s goofus assistant but seems pretty competent to me); his wife is played by future Hart to Hart star Stefanie Powers; Elke Sommer and Cesare Danova are listed as “guest stars”; and one of the victims is Sue Lyon, who must have regarded this role as a major comedown after having worked for Stanley Kubrick on Lolita 14 years earlier!
But it’s one of those movies that not only is boring in and of itself (the screenplay was by Arthur C. Pierce based on an “original” story by Earle Lyon, and the director of record was John Florea, though according to imdb.com he had uncredited help at the helm from writer Pierce and Gene Fowler, Jr.) but also sucks off too many other truly great movies, notably the 1933 classic The Invisible Man. I wondered how John Florea and company were able to direct the women who play the victims of the invisible strangler — and in particular how they got them to pantomime being strangled by an invisible assailant — but then I wondered the same thing about James Whale working with Walter Brennan, Una O’Connor and the other great character actors who ran afoul of his invisible psycho.
The filmmakers even had the chutzpah to steal the marvelous scene in the Whale film in which the carefully laid plans to ambush the Invisible Man in the home of a person he’s threatened to kill are undone by a stray cat climbing the wall around the victim’s home and triggering the trap — only in this movie, instead of a cat, it’s two stray birds. Lyon and Pierce also steal from another genuine classic, Psycho, in having the villain be a young man who first murdered his mother and then fell under her spell, committing further murders in the illusion that his new victims are also his mother and he’s punishing her once again for having abandoned him (shown in black-and-white flashbacks the filmmakers prove utterly incapable of integrating into the main action with anything remotely resembling credibility or continuity). I don’t remember seeing this film on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 list, but it certainly would have deserved their “treatment”!
Bride of the Gorilla (Jack Broder Productions, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Bride of the Gorilla, which Charles and I watched the night before The Astral Factor, actually proved to be a pretty good movie — not a deathless horror classic, and certainly in thrall to earlier, better films that had involved the same personnel, but quite entertaining, well worth watching and a movie the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 folks also seem to have left alone, perhaps because even they realized it didn’t deserve their ridicule.
The stars are Barbara Payton as Dina Van Gelder, frustrated wife of Klaas Van Gelder (Paul Cavanagh), who’s stuck her on his rubber plantation in the Amazonas [sic] and left her miserable and in search of alternate male companionship; Lon Chaney, Jr. as Police Commissioner Taro of the Itmas Valley region that borders the Amazonas, who delivers the opening narration over a traveling shot of the Van Gelder plantation house in ruins; and the two men who are offering Dina the alternate companionship she isn’t getting from her sniveling weakling of a husband: plantation overseer Barney Chavez (Raymond Burr) and in-house psychiatrist (what on earth is he doing there?) Dr. Viet (Tom Conway). It’s hard to believe that, given her druthers, Barbara Payton would pick Raymond Burr over Tom Conway, but she does, starting a clandestine affair with him that she hopes will lead to her departure from the plantation, especially since her husband has decided to fire him.
Instead Barney decides to grab both the plantation and Dina by offing her husband — he takes him for a walk in the jungle, then trips him while he’s in the path of a poisonous snake, and the snake ex machina finishes him off — marrying her and then, much to her disappointment, announcing that he’s going to stay on at the plantation as the owner and she’ll have to remain there with him. This pisses off the native servant girl, Larina (Carol Varga), who goes to her grandmother Al-long (Gisela Werbisek) to complain — and grandma, either because Barney jilted her granddaughter for the white girl or she’s upset that he killed Klaas, puts a curse on Barney that will change him into a gorilla.
Bride of the Gorilla, despite the risible title producers Edward Leven and Jack Broder saddled it with (the working title was The Face in the Water, which is more evocative and suspenseful but would probably have been a less effective selling tool to the audience for a film like this), is actually a pretty good movie, thanks largely to the efforts of a good cast and writer-director Curt Siodmak. It’s a pretty obvious recycling job from movies both Siodmak and his cast members had done better in the past — most notably The Wolf Man (though it’s jarring to see Raymond Burr playing the were-gorilla, especially with Lon Chaney, Jr. appearing elsewhere in the cast, and frankly this film might have been even better had they switched roles), from whom Siodmak borrows not only the central character but also the Maria Ouspenskaya role (it’s quite obvious that Werbisek is channeling Ouspenskaya as the elderly female oracle!) and even a few scenes, notably one in which Raymond Burr’s arms suddenly start going dark, his first stage of transition into gorilla-hood, just as he’s about to sign the contract to sell the plantation (which he quickly decides not to do anyway) — he had to cope with this shit without even the warning of a full moon to give him a heads-up that he was about to change!
Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie is also evoked, not only by Tom Conway’s presence in the cast but by some striking visual quotes, notably one of Barbara Payton standing straight and tall in the shadows of the half-lit jungle at night. Though derivative as all get-out and clearly inferior to the films it’s derivative of, Bride of the Gorilla is nonetheless a legitimately entertaining and chilling 64 minutes’ worth of viewing time; Siodmak’s direction is genuinely creative, seeking unusual camera angles and getting the most out of cinematographer Charles Van Enger’s evocative, chiaroscuro work — and his cast is coolly competent and, in Payton’s case, better than that; playing close to her real-life character — the slut who got off on playing the men in her life against each other — Payton creates a convincing update of the silent-era vamp and gives quite a bit of life to this film.
Bride of the Gorilla, which Charles and I watched the night before The Astral Factor, actually proved to be a pretty good movie — not a deathless horror classic, and certainly in thrall to earlier, better films that had involved the same personnel, but quite entertaining, well worth watching and a movie the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 folks also seem to have left alone, perhaps because even they realized it didn’t deserve their ridicule.
The stars are Barbara Payton as Dina Van Gelder, frustrated wife of Klaas Van Gelder (Paul Cavanagh), who’s stuck her on his rubber plantation in the Amazonas [sic] and left her miserable and in search of alternate male companionship; Lon Chaney, Jr. as Police Commissioner Taro of the Itmas Valley region that borders the Amazonas, who delivers the opening narration over a traveling shot of the Van Gelder plantation house in ruins; and the two men who are offering Dina the alternate companionship she isn’t getting from her sniveling weakling of a husband: plantation overseer Barney Chavez (Raymond Burr) and in-house psychiatrist (what on earth is he doing there?) Dr. Viet (Tom Conway). It’s hard to believe that, given her druthers, Barbara Payton would pick Raymond Burr over Tom Conway, but she does, starting a clandestine affair with him that she hopes will lead to her departure from the plantation, especially since her husband has decided to fire him.
Instead Barney decides to grab both the plantation and Dina by offing her husband — he takes him for a walk in the jungle, then trips him while he’s in the path of a poisonous snake, and the snake ex machina finishes him off — marrying her and then, much to her disappointment, announcing that he’s going to stay on at the plantation as the owner and she’ll have to remain there with him. This pisses off the native servant girl, Larina (Carol Varga), who goes to her grandmother Al-long (Gisela Werbisek) to complain — and grandma, either because Barney jilted her granddaughter for the white girl or she’s upset that he killed Klaas, puts a curse on Barney that will change him into a gorilla.
Bride of the Gorilla, despite the risible title producers Edward Leven and Jack Broder saddled it with (the working title was The Face in the Water, which is more evocative and suspenseful but would probably have been a less effective selling tool to the audience for a film like this), is actually a pretty good movie, thanks largely to the efforts of a good cast and writer-director Curt Siodmak. It’s a pretty obvious recycling job from movies both Siodmak and his cast members had done better in the past — most notably The Wolf Man (though it’s jarring to see Raymond Burr playing the were-gorilla, especially with Lon Chaney, Jr. appearing elsewhere in the cast, and frankly this film might have been even better had they switched roles), from whom Siodmak borrows not only the central character but also the Maria Ouspenskaya role (it’s quite obvious that Werbisek is channeling Ouspenskaya as the elderly female oracle!) and even a few scenes, notably one in which Raymond Burr’s arms suddenly start going dark, his first stage of transition into gorilla-hood, just as he’s about to sign the contract to sell the plantation (which he quickly decides not to do anyway) — he had to cope with this shit without even the warning of a full moon to give him a heads-up that he was about to change!
Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie is also evoked, not only by Tom Conway’s presence in the cast but by some striking visual quotes, notably one of Barbara Payton standing straight and tall in the shadows of the half-lit jungle at night. Though derivative as all get-out and clearly inferior to the films it’s derivative of, Bride of the Gorilla is nonetheless a legitimately entertaining and chilling 64 minutes’ worth of viewing time; Siodmak’s direction is genuinely creative, seeking unusual camera angles and getting the most out of cinematographer Charles Van Enger’s evocative, chiaroscuro work — and his cast is coolly competent and, in Payton’s case, better than that; playing close to her real-life character — the slut who got off on playing the men in her life against each other — Payton creates a convincing update of the silent-era vamp and gives quite a bit of life to this film.
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