A Bullet for Joey (Bischoff-Diamond/United Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had watched a far less exalted movie: A Bullet for Joey, a 1955 independent thriller made by producers Sam Bischoff and David Diamond for United Artists release with the over-the-hill gang: the stars are Edward G. Robinson and George Raft, and the female lead is played by Audrey Totter, a talented and powerful actress who never quite got on the “A” list — though comparing her performance here to her work in a similar role in the 1947 film of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake makes clear that she was just as striking a screen personality and had got considerably better as an actress in the intervening eight years. The film is a good one but one which could have been considerably better: the plot deals with Raoul Leduc (Robinson), a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who heads an investigation into the bludgeoning to death of one of his officers. The officer was killed by an organ grinder — actually a spy disguised as an organ grinder — who was keeping watch on a nuclear physics professor at McGill University, Dr. Carl Macklin (George Dolenz) and who had concealed a movie camera in his barrel organ to photograph Macklin’s morning routine so the head of his spy ring, Eric Hartman (Peter Van Eyck), could make arrangements to kidnap him. To head the kidnapping ring he hires Joe Victor (Raft), a criminal who insists that his whole gang be brought in as part of the deal — including his former girlfriend Joyce Geary (Audrey Totter), who’s running some sort of legitimate business in Cuba and really doesn’t want to rejoin Joe on the dark side, only one of Joe’s other men blackmails her into it.

The film was directed by Lewis Allen from a script by “Geoffrey Homes,” a.k.a. Daniel Mainwaring, and A. I. Bezzerides (two much better writers than one would gather from this movie) based on a story by James Benson Nablo, and the main reason it isn’t a better film than it is is Allen’s paceless direction; scene after scene that needs relentless pacing to make its effect ambles along at a lackadaisical pace that gives the audience all too much time to ponder the plot holes. The biggest one is one Charles spotted: why, when the seemingly all-important professor — obviously the writers were thinking the Soviet Union wanted to kidnap the professor so he would work on their nuclear arsenal instead of America’s — has utterly no security detail around him at all, the bad guys go through all this elaborate planning instead of just grabbing him. Maybe the idea was that they were setting the Audrey Totter character to seduce him and ultimately either get him so far in sexual thrall or make him spend so much money on her as to get him so far in debt that he’d agree, more or less willingly, to change sides in the Cold War and go to work for the Soviets voluntarily — but nothing in the script even hints at that. Instead the writing committee pulls one of the stupidest clichés in the book and has Totter’s character fall genuinely in love with the professor — and they actually go off together after Robinson’s character and his squad of Mounties figure out the plot and get their men.

 A Bullet for Joey has the air of a penance project for both Robinson and Mainwaring, who’d been blacklisted for their Leftist connections and seemed to have taken the chance to work on an open piece of anti-Soviet Cold War propaganda in hopes that would get them off the list (though in Robinson’s case the man who got him off the blacklist was Cecil B. DeMille, who cast him as Dathan in The Ten Commandments a year later). Cold War propaganda films can be good movies on occasion (the Paramount cheapie The Atomic City with Gene Barry is a tight, exciting thriller and as long as you view the “atomic bomb secrets” as just another MacGuffin you should be fine with it) but this isn’t one of them, and it’s less the fault of Robinson or Raft (who turn in perfectly polished, non-groundbreaking old-pro performances — it was their second film together, after Manpower in 1941, but the publicity for it made it seem like their first) than of that damnably sluggish director, who made his first mark in 1944 with The Uninvited — a ghost story, and one expects ghost stories to be slow!

Borrowed Wives (Tiffany, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our “feature” last night was Borrowed Wives, a 1930 film from Tiffany that I had originally thought would be a romantic melodrama with envelope-pushing “pre-Code” kinkiness, something on the order of Expensive Husbands. Instead — as the bouncy stock music over the opening credits (instead of the dire stock music I’d been expecting) made clear even before the film began — it was a comedy, and it began with what was by far its best scene. We see a huge billboard announcing that visitors are arriving in Monterey, listing the fruits and vegetables the area is famous for (including the casaba), and announcing that visitors are welcome. Behind the billboard we see two motorcycle cops, Bull Morgan (Paul Hurst) and Mac (Tom London), lamenting that they haven’t seen any people driving through the area above the speed limit lately. Then a man in a nice car zips through and Mac gives chase, and afterwards another man in a nice car zips through and Bull gives chase.

It turns out they’re both racing to a nearby airport to meet their fiancées and marry them — and it also turns out, this being at least an attempt at a romantic farce, that they’re both hurrying along to meet the same woman, Alice Blake (Vera Reynolds). The first man, who disappears from the action after the opening scene, gets read the riot act by the fiercely misogynistic Mac, who says he should be glad he’s going to arrest him and thereby keep him from getting married. The second man is Peter Foley (Rex Lease, top-billed, a “B”-lister in the silent era who became a “C”-lister when sound came in), who has to marry that day so his wife can inherit his family’s fortune; otherwise his uncle Henry (Charles Sellon) gets it. He is, or at least seems to be, genuinely in love with Alice, but when he meets her at the airport and she turns him down, he looks for someone else he can marry, or at least pose as being married to, on the spot so he can have a “wife” by midnight and grab the fortune. His friend Joe Blair (Robert Randall, later known as Robert Livingston) has the answer: Blair is an executive in love with his secretary, Julia Thorpe (Nita Martan) — though Julia is also Bull Morgan’s girlfriend and the cop is so jealous he’s threatened to beat up any other man who shows interest in her — and they hatch a scheme to go to Uncle Henry’s home and claim that Julia is his wife.

About 20 minutes into the film, its action moves to Henry’s old dark house, full of the expected secret passages — including a room where Henry keeps a pet panther (at least that’s what it’s called in the synopsis; it was some sort of big cat but I couldn’t tell it was a panther just by looking at it in the film). Henry is in a wheelchair, though to no one’s particular surprise (no one in the audience, that is) he doesn’t really need it: I think there were far more able-bodied people posing as cripples in 1930’s movies than there were people who appeared in wheelchairs because their characters actually needed them (a taboo that got broken only when Lionel Barrymore became so disabled by his crippling arthritis he really needed a wheelchair, so MGM had to come up with parts for him he could play from a chair — he had just been scheduled to play Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, a part he’d become identified with on radio, when he lost his ability to walk and had to give up the part; Reginald Owen stepped in at the last minute, though Barrymore still appeared — as himself — in the trailer!).

Anyway, after about a long, dreary half-hour in which everybody congregates at the old dark house — including Bull Morgan and a minister or something (at least someone with the legal authority to marry people; I think he was supposed to be the lawyer or judge with the power to settle the estate Peter’s wife is supposed to inherit), as well as Alice, who’s thought better of her rejection of Peter’s proposal — Julia is kidnapped. Peter reveals the two weren’t really married so he can get the officiant to marry him and Alice, so he can get the inheritance and also the woman he really wants, and then Alice is kidnapped — and in yet another plot twist script compiler Scott Darling (who later wrote the Mr. Wong series films for Boris Karloff at Monogram; I say “compiler” because he seems merely to have assembled this script from old movie clichés and it’s therefore hard to refer to him as a “writer”!) obviously thought would be far more surprising to the audience than it is (or probably was even to a 1930 audience!), the culprit turns out to be Uncle Henry. Well, he is the one with the motive — if Peter doesn’t have a wife, authentic or otherwise, by midnight he gets the inheritance, so it’s in his interest to spirit away any woman Peter might be, or want to be, married to so she can’t get the money and therefore it devolves to him.

Borrowed Wives is the sort of movie that seems to last even longer than it actually does (imdb.com doesn’t give a running time and the download from archive.org we were watching timed out at 62 minutes) and it evokes all too many memories of the genuinely good, imaginative movies it ripped off, not only The Old Dark House but Buster Keaton’s comedy masterpiece, Seven Chances — just as I once joked that at the top level of quality of movies set in the central California missions there was Vertigo and at the bottom level there was Incubus, so at the top of movies with the central premise that a young man has to marry within the day to receive an inheritance there is Seven Chances and at the bottom there’s Borrowed Wives. The director was Frank R. Strayer, who in the early 1930’s had a quirky career at the various independent studios that generated quite a few watchable movies and two minor gems in the horror genre, The Vampire Bat (1933) and Condemned to Live (1935), before he signed with Columbia and settled down to a long career helming the Blondie series — a real pity; it undoubtedly made him a decent living but it steered him away from the Gothic atmospherics that were his greatest strength as a director, and which give some interest even to something as tacky and silly as Borrowed Wives.

Two Plus Fours, a.k.a. Ripstitch the Tailor (Pathé, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Two Plus Fours, made by the Pathé studio’s U.S. branch in 1930 as one of its last gasps before it was absorbed by RKO in 1931 and ultimately folded into that company after two years in which some movies came out as RKO and some as RKO-Pathé, much the way Warner Bros. films sometimes were released in “First National” drag. It was one of the last projects for the Rhythm Boys, the vocal group with which Bing Crosby got his start: he had met Al Rinker, Mildred Bailey’s brother and a singer in his own right, while both were still living in Washington state, and the two had traveled to L.A. and been discovered by Paul Whiteman and signed to his entourage in 1927. The duo of Crosby and Rinker did well on tour but bombed out in New York City, and Whiteman decided that they needed someone who would give the act more verve and showmanship. The person Whiteman recruited to join them was Harry Barris, a live-wire pianist and comic singer who was also a major songwriter and could supply the Rhythm Boys (as Whiteman named them) original material. The Rhythm Boys remained part of the Whiteman organization for three years, until Whiteman went to L.A. to make the big-budget Universal musical revue The King of Jazz (1930) which featured Crosby soloing on the film’s theme song, “Music Hath Charms,” and the Rhythm Boys doing a marvelous number in two-strip Technicolor (the whole film was in color, actually) combining their early hit “Mississippi Mud” and a new song, “So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together.” Then Crosby decided his future lay in Hollywood, so he got the Rhythm Boys to quit Whiteman and join Gus Arnheim’s L.A.-based band at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inside the Ambassador Hotel, while the trio also scrambled for film work.

Two Plus Fours was the trio’s last work together before breaking up — Crosby had landed a solo film contract with Mack Sennett’s studio, where he played in a series of romantic-comedy shorts that established his happy-go-lucky screen character, and he’d clearly outgrown the need for the other two. Pathé was at loose ends, too: they had never recovered from the opprobrium following a terrible accident at their New York studio in which a soundstage burned down while filming a 1929 musical and 11 people were killed — still the worst accident, at least in terms of total lives lost, ever to occur during the actual shooting of a film. They also hadn’t recovered from the loss of their big comedy star, Harold Lloyd, who had switched distribution of his self-produced films to Paramount, or from the loss of Hal Roach’s product, including the Laurel and Hardy movies, when he changed distributors to MGM in 1927. So in order to stay in the comedy market they concocted a series called “Campus Comedies,” about the hijinks of frat boys and the scrapes they got into. Two Plus Fours was filmed under the working title Ripstitch the Tailor, which would have been a better name for it — it would at least have given moviegoers an idea of what the film was about: Two Plus Fours vaguely hints that it has something to do with articles of male clothing but otherwise means nothing. (Some Crosby biographers got confused by the dual title and thought Bing and the Rhythm Boys had made two short comedies for Pathé, not just this one.)

The 20-minute short was actually a feature for Jewish dialect comedian Nat Carr, who plays a tailor named Ginsberg: he’s irritated that the college boys have given him the nickname “Ripstitch the Tailor” but he can’t do anything about it because their suit orders represent his principal source of income. He’s being harassed by the typical evil landlord (Edgar Dearing) but he’s hopeful because Tait College’s new school year is about to start and he’s counting on the frat boys to buy so many suits for the upcoming start-of-the-year rally he’ll be able to pay off his debt. Only the frat boys got waylaid on the train coming into town: they got into a craps game with an African-American porter (when this character first appeared he had a disgusted look on his face while the white kids were playing what was supposed to be a jazz number, and I joked that what he was really thinking was, “Oh, no, not more white boys who think they can swing”) and lost not only their money but the ukuleles and other musical instruments they’d been playing. When the train enters a tunnel (the shots of the train moving are obviously stock footage, but director Ray McCarey and editor John F. Link cut them in so smoothly they’re believable) the kids jump the Black guy and get the instruments back and start their jam session over again. The frat boys eventually arrive in town and they’re so broke they don’t even have a car; they’re driving around in a horse-drawn cart reading “Transfer” (1930’s-speak for a moving company) and they arrive at Ginsberg’s just after he’s serviced another college kid in a baggy suit he insists “fits like a glove” and caught the kid just as he was about to walk out of his store without paying. (The kid reaches into his new suit and gets out his wallet to give Ginsberg the money; one wonders how the wallet got there if it’s a suit he’s never worn before.)

Then the landlord shows up and after him Ginsberg gets the college kids, who explain that they’re broke — but he agrees to make them the suits anyway in hopes they’ll find a way to pay him for them. The kids meet back at their frat house and sing a song (apparently based on the University of Maine “Stein Song” that was a hit for Rudy Vallée, America’s most popular male singer until Crosby replaced him) hailing Ripstitch the Tailor; Crosby is featured on the song’s middle-eight section but otherwise this is the sort of film in which a person who later became a superstar is lost in the crowd: you hear his familiar speaking voice, look around for him, spot him and say, “Oh, there he is.” Eventually the kids find money they held back from the Black crapshooter on the train and pool their resources so they’re within $100 of paying Ginsberg’s bill; they jump a heavy-set fellow student (Tom Hanlon) who just happened to ask them to break it when they needed exactly that much money; they pay off Ginsberg, Ginsberg pays off his landlord, and Ginsberg’s daughter Mary (Thelma Hill) gets Spec (Spec O’Donnell), the head of the fraternity.

 Two Plus Fours isn’t all that funny — Nat Carr’s Jewish-dialect humor is very dated — and the laughs it does have are more from situations than gags, but it’s charming and clever throughout and has at least two good gags: when one of the students sees Ginsberg’s signs — “Don’t Use the Phone,” “Don’t Ask for Credit,” and “Don’t Call Me ‘Ripstitch’” — and neatly slices off the word “don’t” from each sign with his pocket knife; and at the end in which the transfer cart and the horse pulling it are decorated with frat-house symbols the way the kids’ car would be if they could afford one. It’s a curio for Crosby fans — no doubt if Bing hadn’t been in it, it would still be moldering away in a vault somewhere — and one oddity is that the credits make it seem like a Hal Roach production in exile: the director is Ray (Raymond) McCarey, and the “supervising producer” is Fred Guiol (a protégé of George Stevens who rose to become a director himself at Roach and RKO in the mid-1930’s, then quit and went back to working as Stevens’ assistant and one of his regular screenwriters). Ray McCarey was the far less famous brother of director Leo McCarey, whom Bing Crosby would work with in the 1940’s on two of either man’s biggest hits: Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s.

Gangs of New York (Republic, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Gangs of New York, not the 2002 extravaganza directed by Martin Scorsese and dealing with Irish-American gangs in 19^th century New York but a 1938 Republic “B” directed by James Cruze from a story by Samuel Fuller (his first movie credit!) scripted by Fuller, Wellyn Totman and Charles Francis Royal. (Interesting degrees-of-separation here: Martin Scorsese made a biopic about Howard Hughes, The Aviator, while Cruze directed the 1928 film The Mating Call, produced by Howard Hughes.) The credits announce the film was merely “suggested” by Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book Gangs of New York (and the American Film Institute Catalog gets two facts wrong about Asbury’s book: they say it was published in 1936 and call it a novel, though it was at least intended to be nonfiction) — and the Scorsese movie wasn’t much closer; according to Wikipedia, the Academy nominated it for Best Original Screenplay rather than Best Adapted Screenplay because the movie had so little in common with what Asbury wrote.

Anyway, the 1938 Gangs of New York is a contemporary-set gangster film that begins with a massacre in which at least three members of the Maddock gang are shot. Two die immediately, but the third one lingers long enough for police to question him in hospital and ask him who did this. “Rocky’s boys,” he answers — which nonplusses the cops because Rocky Thorpe (Charles Bickford) has been in prison for five years. However, an investigation led by police inspector Sullivan (Willard Robinson) and district attorney Lucas (Charles Trowbridge), who prosecuted Rocky in the first place, concludes that Rocky is still running his gang by remote control from the prison — they interrogate three of Rocky’s associates and find they’re still doing things the way Rocky wanted them to — only the meeting of Lucas and Sullivan is interrupted by Rocky himself, who has just been paroled and threatens them. Only it turns out this isn’t really Rocky, but undercover policeman John Franklyn (also Charles Bickford), whom Sullivan has recruited because of his uncanny resemblance to Rocky except that he doesn’t have the two deep scars on the real Rocky’s face. Franklyn agrees to have plastic surgery to get his face scarred the same way as Rocky’s, and the idea is that instead of being released, the real Rocky is locked in solitary confinement 24/7 with no contact whatsoever with other prisoners or the outside world, while Franklyn brazens his way into running Rocky’s gang. Before this they’ve found out the way Rocky was relaying his instructions to his gang members from prison: he was broadcasting them in code via a ham radio station inside the prison walls! From that point it becomes a pretty standard impersonation movie, with the suspense being what’s going to trip up Franklyn’s masquerade and how he’s going to get out of being killed when the gangsters discover he’s a cop.

He finally is exposed by Rocky’s girlfriend Orchid (Wynne Gibson) and his associate Dapper (Alan Baxter), who recalls that just before he was arrested Rocky had spent $5,000 on a jeweled bracelet for Orchid but hadn’t given it to her; Franklyn has no recollection of the bracelet and Dapper is thereby convinced that he can’t be the real Rocky, who would have remembered an item that was that expensive. Meanwhile, a prison guard who’s on the gang’s payroll finds the real Rocky hidden in the secret cell, and the meeting place for the final confrontation — Rocky (the fake one) has invited all the other gang leaders in New York City for a meeting, ostensibly to discuss a merger but really to get them all arrested with the documentation of their nefarious deeds on them — gets changed by Dapper and it’s touch and go whether the police force will get there in time to save the fake Rocky’s life from the gangsters — now led by the real Rocky, who’s sprung jail. Obviously, the folks at Republic weren’t going to give up the thrill of staging a fight sequence between Charles Bickford and Charles Bickford — though they do it in long shot and it’s pretty clear both men were being doubled — but there’s an earlier scene in which the bad Bickford takes a punch at the good one and the illusion is absolutely convincing.

 Gangs of New York has a lot going for it, including some marvelous characterizations of the subsidiary gangsters (especially Harold Huber’s dandy-ish “Panatella,” who appears to have been named after his favorite cigar!), good effects work and a well-staged car chase (well, chase scenes were another Republic specialty!) with some unusual angles, including a shot in which one of the cars heads straight for the camera and barrels down on the audience, much the way the famous train in an early Lumière film did (and sent a filmically naïve audience running from the theatre, screaming, convinced that a real train was actually coming towards them). It suffers from a cheesy stock music score from Alberto Colombo, and though Cruze directs it well enough (this was his next-to-last film; he had been a major director in the silent era, including making the first big-budget Western spectacle, The Covered Wagon, for Paramount in 1923, but though he made some excellent talkies — notably I Cover the Waterfront, with Claudette Colbert and Ben Lyon, in 1933 — his career never recovered from the transition and by 1938 he was on staff at Republic, where he would make only one more film after this, Come On, Leathernecks) it’s yet another crime film from the 1930’s that really needed the speedy Warner Bros. style and Warners’ great star, James Cagney, in the lead(s).

Murder at Dawn, a.k.a. The Death Ray (Big 4 Films, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles had just downloaded a couple of 1930’s indies from archive.org and we watched one of them: Murder at Dawn, made in 1932 and also known as The Death Ray, featuring the usual assortment of “B”-listers of the period. The “stars,” if you can call them that, are Jack Mulhall as Danny, the action male lead, and Jacqueline Dunn as Doris Farrington, his girlfriend, whose father, Dr. Farrington (Frank Ball), has retreated to a castle-like house in the sticks where he’s perfecting an invention whose true nature is not revealed in the script but has variously been described in published synopses as either a solar-power machine or a death ray. (It’s possible screenwriter Barry Barringer — who also wrote the serial The Return of Chandu, a far better plotted and more interesting movie than this! — was thinking of it as a sort of “dual-use” item that could either be a source of cheap solar power or a death ray.) There’s a quite exciting and suspenseful climax which features the principal bad guy, Henry (Mischa Auer), who landed a job as caretaker on the Farrington estate because his mom (Martha Mattox) is the housekeeper — eerily anticipating Judith Anderson’s similar performance in virtually the same role in Rebecca eight years later — who’s after the secret of Farrington’s invention. He wears a long cape that makes one think producer John R. Freuler actually might have had Bela Lugosi in mind for the part and cast Auer after Lugosi was either unavailable or turned it down, and for someone whose modern-day reputation is as a zany comic Auer is quite effective as a villain (but then he usually played villains in the early sound years and his first comic roles were casting him against type before his success in them changed his type).

Anyway, Auer’s character traps both Dr. Farrington and his daughter in Farrington’s own electronic gizmos, setting the trap so that as soon as the sun comes up Farrington’s “accumulator” will accumulate a charge of electricity and will then release it right into the bodies of both Farringtons unless Farrington père agrees to reveal to Henry the secret of his machine. Until we get to that point, however, the film is really just a very dull Old Dark House knockoff (why did so many people make so many awful movies about people trapped in an old dark house on a stormy night when director James Whale and writer Benn W. Levy had made such a great one that should have shown the rest of Hollywood how that particular sub-genre should be done?) featuring the principals, plus unfunny “comic-relief” second leads Freddie (Eddie Boland) and Gertrude (Marjorie Beebe), chasing each other around the old-dark-house set and arousing acute boredom in the audience. (At least this movie’s mad scientist’s doesn’t have a pet ape.)

Director Richard Thorpe, who by the mid-1930’s had got himself out of the indies and into a job as contract director for the biggest studio in Hollywood, MGM (where he stayed for over two decades, including directing the Elvis Presley movie Jailhouse Rock — Jack Mulhall and Elvis, one degree of separation!), showed in the highly suspenseful and exciting final scene that he was worthy of biggers and betters, something that wasn’t indicated by the rest of the movie — though that’s more writer Barringer’s fault than his (and it still seems hard to believe that Barry Barringer, whose The Return of Chandu was genuinely suspenseful and emotionally moving in ways serials usually weren’t, was unable to give his characters much dimension, or his story much interest, here). The version on archive.org ran only 52 minutes, 10 minutes shorter than the original release, but somehow I don’t think the extra running time would have added anything to this film but more boring shots of people walking, running or chasing each other through that tacky set.

Andrea Bocelli Live in Central Park (PBS, 9/15/11)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The show was one of those interminable PBS pledge-break things, Andrea Bocelli in Concert in Central Park, a concert which actually took place on September 15 but is being shown several times in PBS’s current pledge period with breaks made to look like it’s happening in real time. The Andrea Bocelli phenomenon baffles me because he’s simply not that great a singer — aside from the two songs (“The Prayer” and “Time to Say Goodbye”) that were actually written for him, virtually every selection on this show, whether operatic or popular, is something I’ve heard sung way better by someone else — and yet I don’t actively hate him the way the reviewers for American Record Guide do. (Whenever any of Mario Lanza’s records get reissued, American Record Guide’s critics can’t resist comparing him to Bocelli and saying that Lanza may have been a pop tenor, but at least he was a pop tenor with a real voice.) I think Bocelli’s voice is essentially comfort music, analogous to comfort food. He’s become a star partly due to a compelling backstory — according to his Wikipedia page, he was born with poor eyesight and became blind at age 12 from an accident playing soccer, and just about everything written about Bocelli mentions his blindness (but then Art Tatum, Willie Johnson, Willie McTell, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and many other musicians have shared Bocelli’s blindness but not his blandness!) — and partly due to a pleasant but unthreatening voice.

I suspect even his clear limitations — for someone billing himself as a tenor it seems he couldn’t sing a squarely placed high “C” on pitch without falsetto to save his life (or regain his sight); every time the music went that high he either dropped into falsetto or emitted a noise that reminded me of Rossini’s famous comment on hearing Rubini, the first tenor to sing high “C” full voice, that the note sounded like a capon being strangled. What I really hadn’t expected was that the first half of his concert, in which he sang opera excerpts, was far better than the second half, in which he sang the pop material I would have assumed he’d be more at home with. He was accompanied by the New York Philharmonic with its regular conductor, Alan Gilbert — who sometimes (especially in “O soave fanciulla” from La Bohème, sung with a quite impressive Black South African soprano whose name, at least to the extent I could make it out from Paula Zahn’s relentlessly chipper narration, was Pretty Yundé; they also sang the “Libiamo” from Traviata together and Yundé, or whatever her name is, showed promise of developing into a first-rate Violetta some day) seemed to be moving the music along as slowly as possible so Bocelli could negotiate it.

The show opened with an instrumental selection — the overture to Verdi’s La Forza del Destino — and then Bocelli came out for “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto (competently sung but without distinction) and then “Di quella pira” from Trovatore (he made most of the notes but without the stirring “ring” that makes this an exciting aria given the right sort of voice — Caruso, Domingo, Pavarotti et al.). Then the first of the evening’s succession of guest stars, baritone Bryn Terfel, came out for a rendition of the “Te Deum” finale of act I of Puccini’s Tosca (hardly in the same league as Ruffo’s or Gobbi’s but still damned good) and Bocelli sang Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Judging from this, and the fact that the best performance in the “pop” set (for which he changed the black suit he’d worn during the opera set into a white one that made him look like a waiter) was “Amazing Grace,” which he sang with real sincerity and (pardon the pun) grace despite a gloppy arrangement featuring the Westminster Symphonic Choir, maybe religious songs are his métier (especially since his best-selling album is called Sacred Songs).

After the “Ave Maria” came a pledge break, and then the most exciting singing of the night: the “Vicino a te” final duet from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, which you’ll recall is set during the French Revolution and ends with the revolutionary poet André Chénier and his aristocratic girlfriend, Maddalena de Coigny, singing an ecstatic love duet while being led away to the guillotine. (They even sing “Vive la morte!” — “Long live death!”) For once everybody — guest soprano Ana Maria Martinez, conductor Gilbert and Bocelli himself — seemed to let their hair down; Gilbert conducted with the kind of mad passion a scene like this needs to work, Martinez was fully the mistress of her role and she pulled Bocelli up to her level and made him sound like a real opera singer for the first and only time all night. Then she left the stage and Bryn Terfel returned for the big male-male duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, “Au fond du temple saint,” and then Yondé (or whoever) came out for her two selections, after which Zahn announced the intermission, another pledge break, and then the pop set.

It began with something called “I Walk with You Tonight” by Ennio Morricone (who’s much better known for instrumental film music than as a songwriter) and a version of Riz Ortolani’s “More,” the theme from Mondo Cane, which Bocelli announced that he’d originally wanted to do as a languorous love ballad (which certainly would have been different and might well have worked!), but he’d been talked out of it by Gilbert, who pointed out that the top-selling vocal version in the U.S. had been by Frank Sinatra and therefore they should do it as swing. What followed was neither fish nor fowl, neither credible swing (let’s face it, Bocelli had the New York Philharmonic while Sinatra had Count Basie’s band!) nor good balladry but acceptable on the sheer appeal of the melody and its narrow range, which kept Bocelli in the most comfortable compass of his voice. It didn’t help that on “More” he was joined by David Foster on piano and Chris Botti on trumpet — and while Botti isn’t going to go down in anybody’s  history as one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, he clearly knew a lot more about swinging than either Bocelli or Gilbert did. Then Bocelli sang Domenico Modugno’s “Volare” in yet another pleasant, comfortable version of a song others have sang much better before him, and Céline Dion came out to join him in the big song Foster wrote for him, “The Prayer,” from an otherwise forgotten animated feature called The Quest for Camelot.

 The next piece was a pretty ghastly horror, a vocal version of the slow movement from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez arranged by former New York Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel and accompanied by willowy violinist Nicole Benedetti (who was introduced as a Scotswoman despite her Italian-sounding name — as the American Record Guide has noted lately, in order to get a contract as a classical violinist lately you seem to have to be female, and drop-dead gorgeous young female at that, so the record company can put a scantily clad picture of you on the cover and hopefully sell CD’s to people otherwise uninterested in classical music!); Benedetti’s contribution was O.K. but the whole thing was embarrassing not only to anyone who knows the piece in its original form as a concerto for guitar and symphony orchestra but also anyone who’s heard Miles Davis’ riveting version with Gil Evans’ orchestra on the album Sketches of Spain. Then Bocelli did the predictable “O sole mio,” once again perfectly acceptably but hardly in the same league as Caruso.

Ironically, though, the worst selection of the night didn’t involve Bocelli at all: it came about at this stage of the concert and featured Bryn Terfel doing, of all things, “Home on the Range.” Now I’m of the opinion that the version Bing Crosby recorded on September 27, 1933 in Los Angeles with Lennie Hayton’s orchestra is definitive — no one is going to outdo Bing on this one (even Bing himself couldn’t equal it in his remake) — and what’s amazing is that not only does Bing outpoint Terfel on emotion and soul, he outsings him technically as well. Bing’s swooping melisma on the line “the graceful white swan goes gliding along” (his voice really does conjure up the image of a swan gliding along in the sky) is utterly beyond Terfel’s powers, or perhaps beyond his interest because that part of the song was cut from Tefel’s version. It would have helped if Terfel had used Lennie Hayton’s arrangement for the Crosby version instead of the God-awfully pretentious one he did have to sing to, though one thing I have to say for Terfel is at least he pronounced the “t” in “often” (Crosby omitted it). Fortunately, “Amazing Grace,” which contained some of Bocelli’s best singing all night, came next.

Afterwards there was another pledge break and then Tony Bennett came on to join Bocelli on yet another ill-advised duet — the Kander/Ebb “New York, New York” (the song’s official title is “Theme from New York, New York,” probably to distinguish it from the far livelier “New York, New York” that opens the Bernstein/Comden/Green musical On the Town) — in which Bennett, like Botti on “More,” showed up Bocelli’s total lack of syncopation or understanding of jazz rhythm. After that they trotted out Ana Maria Martinez to sing Sarah Brightman’s original part on the star-making hit “Time to Say Goodbye,” and then Bocelli’s final encore returned to the world of opera with “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot, blessedly equipped with the opera’s final chorus (to the same melody) to fill it out better than in performances that just come to a thudding halt at the point in the score when the other characters return to the stage. I hadn’t thought Andrea Bocelli would turn out to be a better opera singer than he is a pop star, but he is; though he’s only a second-rate opera singer and Pavarotti (who apparently gave him some sort of career boost early on) and Domingo needn’t have worried about the competition, at least he has a familiarity with operatic music and a basic understanding of how it’s supposed to go that seems to leave him in the world of pop.

What’s weirdest about Bocelli is that he doesn’t seem to have any soul; everything he sings settles at a level of blandness, as if he really doesn’t care what the words mean or what the composer is attempting to convey through the music; all music seems to mean to him is an excuse to create pretty sounds a lot of people will pay a lot of money — or, as in this free concert, at least sit in the rain for a long time — to hear. I feel about Andrea Bocelli much the way I feel about Andrew Lloyd Webber: I don’t think he’s magnificent and I don’t think he’s single-handedly destroying music, and I can hope his performances of operatic material turn people on to this sort of music and lead them to investigate it with more powerful singers. He’s got a pleasant voice, though one of limited range and carrying power, and as long as he uses it in material he’s comfortable with and doesn’t send him into the danger spots above the staff he’s quite nice to listen to — but comparing him to the great operatic tenors of the past (or even to Lanza, who sang pop material as if it were opera — all too often Bocelli sings opera as if it were pop — and who showed in records like “Serenade” from The Student Prince that he was capable of wrenchingly soulful interpretations way beyond Bocelli’s capabilities) is preposterous.

Diagnosis: Unknown (TV, 1960)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I watched a rather intriguing TV show downloaded from archive.org: the first of nine episodes from a 1960 summer replacement series called Diagnosis: Unknown which I suspect was the first TV series in history to dramatize the workings of forensic science. Yes, before Quincy (which this show resembles not only in the lead character but also in his having an Asian sidekick, though here he’s Indian instead of Japanese) and the CSI and NCIS franchises, here we got Dr. Daniel Coffee (Patrick O’Neal), smoking like a chimney (the fact that doctors are shown smoking and everyone smokes in enclosed rooms, even inside a hospital, dates these old TV shows big-time) and outfitted with a thin moustache and beard that usually belonged to the iconography of villains rather than hero. He’s outfitted with three assistants, Indian doctor Motital Mookerji (Cal Bellini), nurse Olivia Brenn (Millette Alexander) — whom Dr. Coffee treats as a bimbo even though she isn’t (indeed, she’s a good deal less annoying than the Pauley Perrette character on NCIS), and Link (Martin Huston), a teenager who’s going through various musical obsessions (in this episode he wants to reinvent himself as Lionel Hampton — I kid you not!) when he’s not being comically obnoxious and disruptive.

This quartet of forensic medicos are up against the murder of the mistress of multimillionaire Lester Farnum (Murray Matheson), and the suspects are Mrs. Farnum (played with just the right world-weariness by Patricia Barry), junkyard worker Don Harding (a slimmer, more muscular and decidedly hotter version of Larry Hagman than the one we’re used to) and wine merchant Freddie Ziegler (Tom Bosley, somewhat slimmer and less baggy-faced than the version who played Ron Howard’s father on Happy Days but easily recognizable: one can readily see why he was picked to play Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in the 1960 musical Fiorello! after the originally intended star, Lou Costello, died suddenly in 1959). The episode title, “A Case of Radiant Wine,” was a reference to a 1948 French wine that was radioactive due to contamination of the soil in which the grapes were grown with carbon-14; though it wasn’t enough to kill her, the victim had drunk some of the radioactive wine (which was supposed to have been recalled) and the killer had handled the bottle and left traces of its radioactivity on the curtains where he hid out just before he knocked off the victim, whom he killed for the all too common (in fiction and in life) motive that he had the hots for her but she had no interest in him “that way” whatsoever. It was a neat program and I’m sorry we can’t see more of the episodes — and the appearances of Hagman and Bosley in roles other (and far younger!) than the ones we know them for was a welcome bonus.