Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ended up screening “The Reichenbach Fall,” an episode of the new, much-talked-about BBC-TV series Sherlock, which updates the characters of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John H. Watson and some of the other dramatis personae of the canonical stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to a modern-day (21^st century London) setting — though, as the titles of this and the other episodes hint, each Sherlock episode has a connection — at least a tangential one — to the canon. Charles and I had both heard good things about this show — “though not from real Sherlockians!” Charles warned me — and we found it a breezy entertainment, not having that much to do with the real Sherlock Holmes Conan Doyle created but still fun. The major appeal in this show (written by Steve Thompson to a show format created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, and breezily directed by Toby Haynes) is the rather Mixmaster-ish way elements of the canon got blended, spliced and otherwise manipulated to form an entertaining story. Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch, who despite his cumbersome name scored points with me for pronouncing the “t” in “often”) and Watson (Martin Freeman) are both cast considerably younger than they’ve been in more orthodox depictions, and at the time of this story they’re still living together in the fabled flat at 221B Baker Street — Gatiss and Moffat didn’t make the mistake Conan Doyle did of marrying Watson off and moving him out at the end of his second Holmes story, The Sign of Four — which, as Holmes develops a public reputation and becomes part of the celebriati, causes Watson some consternation because gossip columnists are pondering the situation of two unrelated men living together and hinting that Holmes and Watson are Gay. In this version of the story “The Reichenbach Fall” is actually a priceless painting by Turner, which is stolen and which Holmes recovers, and then there’s a montage of other important cases — a kidnap victim Holmes finds and rescues, a crooked international banker (isn’t that redundant?) whom Holmes apprehends, and a supposed “suicide” Holmes proves was murdered — that get Holmes’ name on the front covers of the tabloids and give him a public notoriety he doesn’t want.

Then we see a young man who’s supposed to be Professor James Moriarty (Andrew Scott) break into the display of the Crown Jewels (Charles, who’s been there, noted that the show depicted it as far less crowded than it actually is), the Bank of England and Pentonville Prison — though he doesn’t steal either the Crown Jewels or anything from the Bank of England’s vaults, nor does he release any of the prisoners. Instead, behaving less like Conan Doyle’s Moriarty (who went out of his way to be reclusive even to his confederates) than like the Joker (particularly as played by Jack Nicholson and later Heath Ledger in the Batman movies), Moriarty seats himself in the middle of the display of the Crown Jewels, wearing them along with a full-dress robe to make himself look like a king, when he’s arrested. Holmes is accosted in a men’s restroom by woman reporter Kitty Riley (Katherine Parkinson), and after some witty by-play between the two (the only reasons he can think of for her to accost him in a men’s room is either she wants to kill him or she wants to have sex with him, but later he not only figures out she’s a reporter but she’s planted clues on herself, like an inkstain, to see if he’s as good as his reputation for deducing things about people) she threatens to write an exposé about her if he doesn’t cooperate with her. Moriarty goes to trial and Holmes makes a mockery of the whole proceeding, upbraiding the judge and the prosecutor and making it clear he knows more about legal procedure than they do; Holmes ends up in jail for contempt of court — Watson has to bail him out — and Moriarty, though he puts on no defense, is acquitted because he’s been able to research every member of the jury, identify a relative or lover or friend they care about, and threaten to kill that person if he’s convicted. Eventually Moriarty hacks into the computer system and manages to delete all references to himself so he can pose as one “Richard Brook,” an actor whom Holmes has hired to portray a mythical criminal mastermind so he can make himself look good solving crimes attributed to the mythical “Moriarty” but actually committed by Holmes himself. He feeds this story to Kitty Riley (one suspects writer Thompson so named her to evoke comparison to the notorious “black” biographer Kitty Kelley) and she publishes it.

Also in the dramatis personae are Holmes’ brother Mycroft, the Diogenes Club (where talking, save in the Strangers’ Room, is strictly forbidden — something the Gatiss/Moffat Holmes cheerily ignores even though Conan Doyle’s Holmes was well aware of it) and a sinister post-9/11 plot twist in which Mycroft, whom Sherlock Holmes said in one of the canonical stories virtually was the British government, subjected Moriarty to “enhanced interrogation” to try to find out the secret computer code by which Moriarty could hack into any system anywhere in the world and get any computer to do what he wanted. (Not all the updating in this story works well, but transforming Moriarty from a brilliant mathematics professor who was the world’s authority on the binomial theorem into a super-hacker who can break through any computer security system was an inspired touch.) Eventually Moriarty plants professional assassins in Mrs. Hudson’s building and bids them kill the three people Holmes is closest to — Watson, Mrs. Hudson and Inspector Lestrade — unless Holmes commits suicide, which he does by jumping off a tall building in a confrontation clearly evoking the final one between Holmes and Moriarty in “The Final Problem” (though Moriarty doesn’t go over the side of the building with Holmes the way he did over the Reichenbach Falls in Conan Doyle’s story; instead he’s killed himself just before Holmes does, which is what convinces Holmes that the only way he can stop the assassins is to die himself), and the end of the story — hinted at by a framing sequence at the start showing Watson unburdening himself of his grief to a Black woman psychiatrist — shows Watson crying at Holmes’ tombstone and Holmes himself hanging out watching Watson mourn him … though with no clue as to how Holmes survived (I guess that will have to wait for the next season opener).

What’s most interesting about this adaptation is how edgy the characters are drawn — Conan Doyle’s Holmes was able to show some tact and behave normally when social situations required it, but the Gatiss/Moffat Holmes has an irresistible compulsion to show up his intellectual inferiors even when he has nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so, and Watson is little better in that department. Charles and I have avoided the most recent Holmes movies — the two starring Robert Downey, Jr., which kept the Victorian setting of the original stories but did some of the same computerized gimcracks of this version and essentially made Holmes into little more than an action hero in a different sort of costume (when I heard Downey was playing Holmes I thought, “If he plays him the way he played the Singing Detective, that could be good; if he plays him the way he played Iron Man, that would be a disaster,” and given the commercial imperatives of the movie business these days I knew the latter was far more likely than the former), but Sherlock is an engaging revamp of the character and it’s a workmanlike show even though it could easily have been done with more sensitivity towards the values of the original stories and still work. I did find it amusing that, though everything else was clearly set in the world of today, the Holmes/Watson residence at 221B Baker Street actually looked (except for the excessively trendy electric lamps that illuminated it) very much like a 19^th century apartment!

Verdi: Ernani (Metropolitan Opera, 2/25/12)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I screened a recent Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Verdi’s opera Ernani — originally broadcast to movie theatres through the “Live in HD” program on February 25 and rebroadcast on KPBS Sunday, June 24 at noon (in the Sunday morning/afternoon ghetto in which the local PBS affiliate has exiled so many of the best programs, not only the Met’s live operas but also Moyers and Company) — which was quite entertaining even though I have much fonder memories of an earlier Met telecast of Ernani from 1983, when this production (by Pier Luigi Samartini with costumes by Peter J. Hall) was brand-new and Ernani was played by Luciano Pavarotti, who despite his bulk had enough charisma and sheer energy to suggest the Errol Flynn-esque action hero the character should be. This time around Ernani was Marcello Giordani, a competent enough tenor even though there’s a rather nasty vibrato in his voice (not quite a wobble but the sort of thing hard-core opera nuts call a “bleat”), the heroine Elvira was Angela Meade (who in 2008 did the 42^nd Street number and sang in this production as a last-minute replacement for an indisposed Sondra Radvanovsky, who some modern-day opera freaks consider the world’s greatest still-living and still-singing Verdi soprano.

This time Meade got the star part from the get-go, and the lower-voiced men were Dimitri Hvorotovsky as Don Carlo (a.k.a. Charles V, king of Spain) and Ferruccio Furlanetto as the real baddie of the piece, de Silva. The plot came from a play by Victor Hugo called Hernani — though Verdi’s librettist, Francesco Maria Piave (who’s had a lot of nasty things said about him by Verdi’s biographers, though by and large I think Verdi’s operas with Piave as librettist or co-librettist tend to be stronger than his ones with other writers — at least until he used Arrigo Boïto for Otello and Falstaff, which had the benefit of Shakespeare-derived plots as well!), changed the names of the lead characters from Hernani and Doña Sol to Ernani and Elvira, no doubt to give the singers something easier to pronounce. Hernani the play is far better known for the riot that broke out during its premiere than for its plot; at the time virtually all serious French drama was written in a strict poetic meter called the alexandrine, and when Hugo, a few minutes into the story, had one character interrupt another character in mid-alexandrine some people in the audience were so upset they started screaming their disapproval. (He was probably influenced in this by Shakespeare, whose plays had started filtering into the rest of Europe in the early 19^th century; playwrights in continental Europe wondered why their dramas had to be so stiff and formal when an Englishman writing 300 years earlier had broken or simply ignored all the hallowed rules and constructed plays where lines broke off, characters interrupted each other all the time, and the plots freely mixed drama and comedy, and wandered all over the place instead of following the Aristotle-prescribed unities of time — a single day’s duration — and place: just one locale.)

Some of Shakespeare’s plays stretch the suspension of disbelief but in Hernani Hugo did a taffy-pull with it; Hernani is the son of a nobleman who fell from favor when Holy Roman Emperor Charles V became King Charles I of Spain; Hernani’s father is executed by the King’s order and Hernani is forced to assemble a band of outlaws and make his living as a bandit. When the opera opens he’s singing a song to his merry men — the aria “Come rugiada al cespite” — saying that he’s just met and fallen in love with a young woman, Elvira, who’s living at the castle of Don Ruiz Gomez de Silva, but that Silva is going to force her to marry him. Desperate to see Elvira before she gets hitched to the other guy, Ernani crashes the castle — just after Elvira has sung her big aria, “Ernani, involami,” expressing hope that he’ll come for her and Take Her Away From All That — only Silva catches him and they’re about to fight a duel when yet a third contender for Elvira’s affections, King Charles V himself, shows up. Charles presses his suit on Elvira but she’s aware that he’s already married and therefore the best she can expect from him would be his mistress, or “favorite” as the euphemism went, and she’s not interested in a guy she can’t lawfully marry and live with above-board. In the second act Ernani, believed to be dead, shows up in disguise as a pilgrim and Elvira says she’s going to kill herself rather than go through the forced marriage to Silva. Silva feels bound by the laws of hospitality to shelter Ernani when the king’s men show up to arrest him, and when the king leaves with Elvira as a hostage Ernani and Silva make a pact to rescue her, but with a proviso that has to be one of the most ridiculous dramatic devices in history: as the price of Silva’s help to rescue Elvira, Ernani must kill himself whenever Silva blows his hunting horn (a quite different use of the hunting horn than in the other most famous opera that contains one, Wagner’s Siegfried).

In Act III, Charles is about to be elected Holy Roman Emperor (in actual history he was Holy Roman Emperor before he was made king of Spain, which led to him being Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor and Charles I as king of Spain — three kings later the king of Spain was Charles II) but he still finds time to worry about that pesky business with Elvira, Ernani and Silva. Ernani sneaks into the chamber where Charles is pondering his new title and attempts to assassinate him, but is caught. Elvira pleads for Ernani’s life, and Charles, like King Marke in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, realizes he can’t hold his reluctant woman any longer and decides not only to pardon Ernani but allow him and Elvira to wed. Act IV takes place on the morning of Ernani’s and Elvira’s wedding, but if you think either Victor Hugo or Francesco Maria Piave were going to let this story have a happy ending, you’ve got another think coming: Silva blows his hunting horn on cue, and after a bit of byplay in which Ernani tries to talk him out of it and Silva accuses him of being a dishonorable character (the people who defend this ridiculous story like to say it’s all about “honor,” but it manages to make “honor” look as stupid and bone-headed as Sir John Falstaff said it was in the marvelous monologue from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part 1 that Verdi and Boïto incorporated into the opera Falstaff even though they took most of its plot from The Merry Wives of Windsor), Ernani takes Silva’s dagger and duly stabs himself in the chest, using his last breath to implore Elvira to go on living. That’s how Piave’s original libretto actually ended it, but in this production Elvira takes the dagger (with Ernani’s blood still on it!) and stabs herself as well, though being opera leads the two still get to do a surprising amount of last-minute singing before they expire.

As stupid as its plot is (the business about Ernani having to kill himself whenever Silva blows his horn seemed ridiculous to me as a child, when I first read the story of this opera on the liner notes to a highlights album on the short-lived Regent label called The Heart of Ernani, which for years left me thinking that The Heart of Ernani was actually the opera’s title, and it still seems ridiculous), Ernani is actually one of Verdi’s best early operas — it was his fifth one out of either 26 or 29 (depending on whether you count his extensive revisions of I Lombardi, Stiffelio and Simon Boccanegra as different operas) — composed in the wake of his mega-hits Nabucco and I Lombardi and featuring rousing choruses, strong arias and gripping ensembles. The Met’s staging was traditional, which is a good thing; the scenery and costumes are actually historically appropriate for the opera’s setting in 16^th century Spain (as opposed to all those “Eurotrash” performances which not only move the time and place up but present a confusing mishmash of historical, modern and symbolic costumes, often following a scheme of symbolism and metaphor that is a mystery from the director’s head) and the action moves effectively across the Met’s big stage, though I could have done without the shots between acts of the stagehands pushing scenery around. The singing was a bit more problematic: as I noted above, Giordani has an acceptable but not great tenor voice, and though he’s considerably less massive than Pavarotti was in this role he’s also considerably less charismatic and appealing. (Pavarotti insisted on singing an extra aria Verdi had inserted into Ernani years after its premiere to assuage the ego of a tenor who didn’t think the original score had given him enough to do; the interpolation wasn’t made in this production, and it’s probably just as well.)

Hvorotovsky and Furlanetto are old pros, and though Furlanetto’s voice has got pretty thread-bare by now it’s not inappropriate for an old character whose age, and the bitterness that has come with it, is actually a major part of the plot. Hvorotovsky is enough of a dreamboat (when he arrived on the scene he was hailed as much for his blond good looks as his voice) even now that he’s the sexiest of the three guys, both physically and vocally, but he was never a great singing actor and he doesn’t make the kind of impact in Carlo’s great scene (a marvelous piece of vocal writing that anticipates “Ella giammai m’amo,” the great scena Verdi gave Charles V’s successor, Philip II, in Don Carlos) Sherrill Milnes did in the Pavarotti broadcast. Surprisingly, Angela Meade, the least-known cast member, turned in the best performance; she’s been compared to Joan Sutherland, and like La Stupenda she’s clearly a “woman of size,” but though she was hampered by conductor Marco Armiliato’s poky tempi on her big aria (where the recorded competition includes stunning performances by Rosa Ponselle and Maria Callas!) he sped up for the ensembles and she tore through the role as if this bizarre concatenation of melodramatic plot devices and situations actually meant something. The commentary for the broadcast described Ernani as “bel canto,” a term usually used to refer to the immediately previous generation of Italian opera composers (Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini); in Ernani Verdi was clearly using some of the devices of bel canto (the vocal displays and the slow-fast cavatina-cabaletta structure of several of the arias), but he was already growing beyond that style and writing music that delved deeper into the emotions than any previous Italian opera composer had and needed a stronger, louder, more assertive style of singing. This production certainly does the work justice!

And for comparison's sake, here are my notes on the 1983 Met telecast of Ernani:

Anyway, yesterday began with me watching a very different kind of music video: Verdi’s Ernani, broadcast by the Metropolitan Opera December 17, 1983 (but taped five days earlier), with James Levine conducting a stellar cast featuring Luciano Pavarotti as Ernani, Leona Mitchell as Elvira, Sherrill Milnes as Charles V, Ruggiero Raimondi as Silva and a surprisingly good comprimario, Charles Anthony, as the King’s squire. (Whatever happened to him?) This was actually only Verdi’s fifth opera, and it’s in his best early-Romantic genre, a four-sided romantic triangle (all three of the male leads are in love with the same woman) featuring nobleman-turned-outlaws (one wonders if Johnston McCulley copied Ernani and its source, Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, in creating the character of Zorro), sinister guardians, put-upon wards, amorous kings and codes of honor so ridiculous that, in one of the sillier plot twists in any kind of fiction ever, the hero Ernani is obliged, as a point of “honor,” to kill himself whenever the villain Silva blows his hunting horn. (I remember reading that as a child, in the liner notes to my mother’s copy of the Regent Records album The Heart of “Ernani” — and even then I thought the idea was silly.) Verdi’s music is toe-tapping in its rhythmic insistence (the fact that I had the same visceral reaction to the opening chorus of Ernani as I did to Nirvana’s “About a Girl” — both made me tap my feet in time — is revealing), and the structure of the work is straightforward and predictable. Hugo’s Hernani may have revolutionized French drama with its structural innovations (its sprawling, Shakespearean plot and its bold “breaks” in the traditional metrical structure of French blank verse), but Verdi’s opera version broke no comparable new ground in Italian opera (that had to wait for his second Hugo adaptation, Rigoletto).

As for this performance, Robert Levine had harsh words for it in his survey of Verdi on video in the summer/fall 1987 Opera Quarterly, being particularly withering towards the sets (“so large as to make the characters seem like they are in different operas”) and Leona Mitchell’s Elvira (“devoid of temperament, without the right timbre for the role, who chooses odd, unmusical moments to take breaths and who lacks the chest voice to make some dramatic statements”). I agree with him about the sets — especially Elvira’s bedroom, with a 50-foot painting (nothing in medieval art, other than actual murals, was that big) dominating the wall — though I attribute their unreasonable size more to the amount of stage space they have to cover at the “new Met” than anything else — but I think he’s being woefully unfair to Mitchell. Granted, she’s not Ponselle or Callas, but within her vocal limitations I think she does an excellent job of creating the character, and though she’s somewhat overshadowed by the men, that’s partly Verdi’s fault (that’s the way he wrote the opera!) and partly Levine’s (for casting the three male roles stronger than the female one). Barring a time machine that would give us access to the Met’s 1928-29 production (with Martinelli, Ponselle, Ruffo and Pinza!), this is probably as good an Ernani as we’re going to get, featuring Pavarotti (singing the music rather than playing to the galleries, and reminding us all once again of how good a tenor this man really is, especially singing music that “fits” his voice as well as this does), Milnes (who practically steals the performance in the scene in Charlemagne’s tomb, vividly acting the complex role and singing his heart out) and Raimondi (properly oily and cadaverous, strikingly — and appropriately — resembling Vincent Price in his makeup and mannerisms). Levine, an uneven conductor, is in his element in this score, and while he makes some odd textual choices (a cabaletta to “Infelice! E tuo credevi” and an extended second-act finale that gives Pavarotti another aria — both added by Verdi after the premiere to meet singers’ demands in subsequent productions), this is a display opera, whose appeal is visceral rather than intellectual, and therefore the additions are welcome. — 2/8/95

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I got my journal written at noon to 1:30, then read the remainder of Victor Hugo’s Hernani and tried to take a nap (which I couldn’t do because I was too congested). Hernani, like Oscar Wilde’s Salome, is one of those plays that seems to have been destined from birth for opera librettohood. Its characters ceaselessly explain themselves to themselves, giving readers little respite as they go over and over again, in tortuous detail, to tell us how much they love/hate/fear/want revenge on each other. Without Verdi’s music to back it up, a straight performance of Hugo’s play to a modern audience would result in total laughter (about the only way to make Hernani a viable stage property in the modern era would be to write a virtually new play around it, dramatizing the controversy that surrounded its first performance, with a theatre audience onstage, ostensibly watching the first performance of the play and alternately cheering and hissing as the French literary factions actually did during the real premiere). Verdi and his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave (first of something like 12 collaborations between them, including Macbeth, Rigoletto, Traviata, La Forza del Destino and most of Verdi’s best pre-Boïto operas), adapted it almost “straight,” adding an opening chorus and aria for Ernani (they probably dropped the “H” from his alias out of sheer concern for euphony; they also changed the heroine’s name from Doña Sol to Elvira because the latter was easier to sing) but otherwise changing little except softening the ending (in the play, Hernani and Doña Sol drink poison together, after which Silva kills himself as well; in the opera, only Ernani actually dies onstage); the fact that it works much better set to music only confirms the accuracy of Ethan Mordden’s comment that opera is “the last refuge of the high style,” and even there (as Bernard Shaw noted at the end of the 19th century), the greater psychological realism of the operas of Wagner, Bizet (Carmen, at least), the later Verdi and the Italian composers who followed him had made Ernani seemed old-fashioned and pointless. — 2/15/95

 

The Flirting Widow (Warners as “First National,” 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film Charles and I watched last night was The Flirting Widow, a weird movie made by Warner Bros. in “First National” drag in 1930 based on an oft-filmed story by The Four Feathers author A. E. W. Mason called “Green Stockings.” The film opens with a ghastly old painting and under it we see a caption explaining the legend of the green stockings: that if a woman’s younger sister gets married before she does, the unmarried older sister is supposed to wear green stockings as a sign of her and her family’s shame. Then we meet the principals of the piece: William Faraday (Claude Gillingwater, playing about a decade older than the 60 he really was at the time and using a lot of age makeup and a scratchy voice the sound-on-disc Vitaphone recording system, in the last year Warners/“First National” used it, only make scratchier) and his three daughters. His eldest daughter Evelyn (Leila Hyams) married first, on schedule, but his youngest daughter Phyllis (Flora Bramley) and her boyfriend Bobby Tarbor (Anthony Bushell) are climbing the walls with frustration because dad won’t let Phyllis marry until her middle sister Celia (Dorothy Mackaill) does. The girls’ mother appears to be dead — at least we don’t see or hear mention of her — but the maternal function in the Faraday household is being performed by Aunt Ida Chisholm Faraday (Emily Fitzroy) and by Celia herself, who seems to be the only one of the daughters who can cook a decent meal or play a good game of bridge (the favorite avocation of the Faradays). Celia arrives — dressed in a severe top which Charles said looked like nothing typically worn by women in films until the 1960’s, accessorized by a necktie, and with her hair in a style that matches the butchness of her wardrobe. Phyllis and Bobby have talked the family’s friend, the supremely Nellie James Raleigh Raleigh (William Austin), into proposing to Celia, but she thinks the whole idea is a joke — as do we: the hardest part of the suspension of disbelief required by this movie is to think that either “Rolly” (as he’s called during the movie) or Celia would ever get married … at least to someone of the opposite gender.

Partly to get her dad to allow Phyllis and Bobby to wed, and partly just to get her family off her case about not being married or even dating anyone, Celia invents an imaginary fiancé, Col. John “Wobbles” Smith, who supposedly is serving with the British occupation force in Mesopotamia (we know it as Iraq — plus ça change, plus ça meme chose), and with her sisters looking on she writes him a love letter and stuffs it into a magazine, intending to burn it when they’re not looking. Only, thinking they’re doing her a favor, the girls take the letter out of the magazine and mail it — and, wouldn’t you know, there actually is a Col. John Smith (Basil Rathbone) — actually his last name is the hyphenated “Vaughn-Smith” but he usually just goes by “Smith” — serving with the British occupation force in Baghdad. He gets the letter and quite naturally is amused that he’s received this bizarre love letter from someone he’s never even heard of, let alone met. Meanwhile, with Aunt Ida her confidant, Celia decides to put a notice in the London Times that her Col. Smith has been killed in battle, thereby making herself a widow without ever having had to bother with being a wife — only just as she’s “killed” Col. Smith, the real one shows up, calling himself “Col. Vaughn,” presenting her with the (presumably) late Col. Smith’s effects and saying she’s acting entirely too light-heartedly to be a proper widow, dressing in colors instead of black and going to concerts with her sister and brother-in-law. Col. Smith essentially parks himself in the Faraday home and, despite her efforts to get away (she secretly books passage on a midnight train and asks Rolly to drive her to the station), he essentially wears her down until she falls in love with him for real.

 The Flirting Widow is pretty much a one-joke movie but the one joke is surprisingly funny, and the script by John F. Goodrich has some nicely witty dialogue; William A. Seiter, not exactly one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, directed, but the people who really make this movie are Mackaill and Rathbone. Next to William Wellman’s proto-noir masterpiece Safe in Hell, this is the best work I’ve ever seen from the maddeningly inconsistent Mackaill (even though I must confess that early on I did wonder what this movie might have been like with Katharine Hepburn playing her role!), a no-nonsense woman with little patience for the games being played by her relatives and someone who doesn’t seen any particular reason why she should be pushed into marriage just to make her relatives happy — and though Rathbone’s voice has that annoyingly chipper quality it did in his earliest films (did sound quality improve, did his voice darken and deepen with age, or did he work on it, either alone or with a voice coach, to develop the great Rathbone ring we hear in his Sherlock Holmes movies and his great villainous performances in The Adventures of Robin Hood and Tower of London?), he proves a surprisingly accomplished farceur and romantic comedian. No one who knew Rathbone primarily from his later films (even movies like Rhythm on the River and Bathing Beauty, comedy-musicals in which Rathbone’s character was essentially “serious relief,” if there is such a thing) would have thought of him being as adept at comedy as he is here.

Stars and Stripes Forever (20th Century-Fox, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched the 1952 movie Stars and Stripes Forever on Turner Classic Movies; they were doing a program of musical biopics of famous American composers or bandleaders, including Yankee Doodle Dandy (George M. Cohan), The Glenn Miller Story, Rhapsody in Blue (George Gershwin) and Bound for Glory (Woody Guthrie). Stars and Stripes Forever was, as if you couldn’t guess from the title, a biopic of John Philip Sousa, who was actually the son of a Portuguese immigrant, John Antonio Sousa, though his mother, Maria Elisabeth Trinkhaus, was German. He started studying music at age six, was found to have perfect pitch, and when he was 13 his father, a trombonist in the U.S. Marine Band, signed him up to the U.S. Marine Corps to keep him from joining a circus band. Sousa worked in a theatrical pit band, where he learned to conduct, and in 1880 he returned to the U.S. Marine Band as its principal conductor and wrote some of his first legendary marches for them. In 1890 he quit the Marine Band and formed his own civilian orchestra, which he led continuously from 1892 until 1931, a year before his death. He was known as a rock-ribbed Republican, both politically and personally conservative — when Benjamin Harrison was elected President over Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland in 1888 Sousa commemorated the occasion with a march called “The Thunderer,” and the liner-note writer for one Sousa album said Sousa was probably the only person in the country who would associate the terminally dull Benjamin Harrison with thunder — and he also had a bizarre love-hate relationship with the recording industry.

In 1890 Columbia recorded the U.S. Marine Band in Sousa’s “Washington Post March” (probably his second best-known tune, after “Stars and Stripes Forever”), and though Sousa almost certainly did not conduct the record, that cylinder and a later (and much better-sounding, though that’s probably just an accident of preservation) one of “The Thunderer” from 1896 no doubt preserve the playing of musicians who worked under Sousa. Sousa’s civilian band was signed by Victor Records but though they made over 70 recordings for Victor, only six (“Nobles of the Mystic Shrine,” “Dauntless Battalion,” “Sabre and Spurs,” “Solid Men to the Front!,” “Liberty Loan” and “The U.S. Field Artillery March,” also known as “The Caisson Song” and the official U.S. Army theme song) were actually conducted by him. When he wasn’t having his band make records and gladly taking Victor’s money, he was issuing jeremiads about how the recording industry was ruining American music, mainly by discouraging ordinary people from making music themselves and instead encouraging them just to listen to professionals on record. (He had a point there.) “The ingenuity of a phonograph’s mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, [but] I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embyrotic [sic] Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art,” Sousa wrote in Appleton’s Magazine in 1906. “Under such conditions the tide of amateurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant. Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?” (New York Evening Post music critic Henry T. Finck responded, equally vehemently, “It is a little difficult to see what there is to blunt in the musical sense of a nation which makes a hero of Sousa, paying him $50,000 for a mediocre march not worth $50. … [I] would rather hear Sousa’s band in one of these superior phonographs than in the concert hall, because the record makes it less noisy while at the same time preserving the peculiar quality or tone color of every instrument and soloist as well as every detail of expression.”)

Stars and Stripes Forever was made by 20th Century-Fox in 1952 and starred urbane, Queer Clifton Webb as the rock-ribbed reactionary hetero Sousa … though Webb did quite well. His rather prissy voice doesn’t match the one extant recording of the real Sousa (giving an introduction to a transcription of “Stars and Stripes Forever” for an international radio broadcast sponsored by Bond Bread in 1929) but it projects a surprising level of authority and power. The film was ostensibly based on the real Sousa’s autobiography, Marching Along, but by the time it got filtered through screenwriters Ernest Vajda (“story”) and Lamar Trotti (script; he also got a producer credit) it was pretty much a camp-fest in which, unable to do very much with Sousa’s story to plug it into the usual Hollywood formulae — Sousa married young, stayed that way, had three children and otherwise his life was his music and his principal avocation, trap shooting (oddly unmentioned in the script even though Sousa wrote in his autobiography, on which this film is ostensibly based, “Let me say that just about the sweetest music to me is when I call, ‘pull,’ the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect key announces, ‘dead’” — it seems odd that Vajda, Trotti and director Henry Koster would have neglected a genuine aspect of their subject’s life that was considerably more cinematic than bandleading) — they added a couple of juvenile leads, Marine private Willie Little (22-year-old Robert Wagner in his eighth movie) and burlesque entertainer turned Sousa band vocalist Lily Becker (Debra Paget). In the opening scene, Sousa is the U.S. Marine Band leader and he finds that Little sneaked off the base to get a beer, then tried to sneak back in and got into a fight with a fellow Marine; Little also presents him with a rolled-around tuba he calls a sousaphone (the original sousaphone was designed by Sousa himself in 1893 and made for him by a Philadelphia instrument maker named J. W. Pepper: the idea behind it was that it would sound like a tuba but it would have a hole in the middle so the performer could essentially wear it, thereby making it more convenient to carry in a marching band; it also projected its sound up rather than out, so it could be heard more clearly in a brass section), and when Sousa quits the Marines Little ends up with him in his new band.

I had first seen this movie in the 1960’s on the old NBC Saturday Night at the Movies show but I hadn’t seen it since (for some reason I recalled its title as The March King), and I’d never seen it in color — and the color (all-out three-strip Technicolor by cinematographer Charles G. Clarke) is one of the most delicious things about it, rich, vibrant, bright: a far cry from the dirty greens and browns that dominate movies today and richly flattering both to the ornate uniforms Sousa favored as both a Marine and a civilian and the glorious 1890’s dresses worn by the women. One of the running gags of the film is that Sousa tried to write other kinds of music besides marches, but whenever he tried to write a love ballad (there’s one which he croaks out while his on-screen wife Jennie, played by Ruth Hussey — though the name of Sousa’s real wife was Jean — accompanies on piano) it ended up getting turned into a march: during that sequence, while he’s out of the room, Jennie starts playing his “ballad” in a sped-up tempo and a 4/4 march rhythm. (A while ago I got two Musical Heritage cassettes of modern recordings of Sousa’s music, including some non-march excerpts from his operetta El Capitan; Sousa’s non-marches were actually quite appealing bits of light music and the rest of his output deserves to be better known.)

 Stars and Stripes Forever is a modern-day (well, 1952, anyway) gloss on the Sousa story but it’s still a lot of fun even though much of the fun has nothing to do either with Sousa himself or with Clifton Webb’s performance as him; instead, it’s about the secret marriage of Willie Little and Lily Becker and how they have to sneak around and pretend they’re not married because when he started his civilian band Sousa made a hard and fast rule that the musicians’ wives were not allowed to accompany them on tour. (The payoff to this gag is a scene in which Willie sneaks into Lily’s room on a cross-country train and Sousa catches them and assumes they’re up to illicit hanky-panky instead of licit marital relations acceptable to God, the state and the Production Code.) The story remains in the 1890’s, beginning with Sousa’s last years heading the Marine Band (there’s a nice twist in which they’re playing at a White House reception and President Harrison, tired of getting a speech from everyone in his receiving line, tells Sousa to stop playing waltzes and salon music and strike up a march so no one will be able to hear him and the line will speed up) and ending with Sousa composing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” as a memorial to the Spanish-American War dead — and though there isn’t anything as blatant as the final sequence of the biopic John Paul Jones, in which the image of his dying dissolves into a series of modern-day Navy ships and an unctuous narrator explains that the values John Paul Jones tried to inculcate in the Navy officer corps of his day still hold for the Annapolis grads of 1959, when the film was made, Stars and Stripes Forever ends with a ghostly image of Sousa conducting “The Stars and Stripes Forever” over the various ranks of the U.S. Army marching off to fight whatever enemy awaited in 1952 (the Korean War was still going on and a lot of people thought the U.S. would someday have to fight another land war in Europe, this time against the Soviet Union).

For me, the scene that struck me most was one line from Sousa when he’s leading the first rehearsal of his civilian band and he announces that if he encounters an audience that would rather hear “Turkey in the Straw” than Parsifal, they will play “Turkey in the Straw.” It’s an indication that Sousa appeared in American music at the time when classical and popular music were definitively splitting from each other — through much of the 19th century operas like Verdi’s Rigoletto had generated hit tunes like “La donna è mobile” and there was a healthy interchange between the music of the concert hall and the music of the people (literally, since in the 19th century if you wanted to experience a pop song you usually had to buy the sheet music and play it yourself — which meant you had to be able to play it yourself), but as Sousa began to become popular the two forms of music were starting to separate — and Sousa’s rambunctious marches helped speed the separation and laid the groundwork for the eventual acceptance by white American audiences of ragtime and, ultimately, jazz. At the same time the movie shows that there still were connections between classical and pop music in Sousa’s time; one poster for Sousa’s band shows it appearing with opera singer Emmy Destinn (who really existed) as a guest star, and another sequence shows Estelle Liebling (another genuine opera singer of the period, and one who never recorded herself but who later became Beverly Sills’ voice teacher) singing with the Sousa band in rehearsal (she’s played by Aileen Carlyle).

After Stars and Stripes Forever I waited for Charles’ late homecoming and watched a couple of Fourth of July specials on major networks, one from New York sponsored by Macy’s on NBC and one from Boston with the Boston “Pops,” conductor Keith Lockhart (who’s put on the pounds much the way Elton John did) and the new-look Jennifer Hudson doing “Feelin’ Good” (the Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse song from The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd, incomparably recorded in the 1960’s by Carmen McRae and instrumentally by John Coltrane; Nina Simone also cut it, and her version is probably more famous than Carmen’s, but that chiseled diction and bell-like intonation of Carmen McRae is absolutely perfect for this song, though Hudson gave it a quite good rendition marred only by the dance-music sameness of her backing and the way she, like the late Donna Summer, is strait-jacketed by it) and “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” her big ballad from Dreamgirls, which remains powerful even though it loses something out of context. As just about anyone who’s seen one of her commercials for Jenny Craig knows by now, Jennifer Hudson is quite a bit slimmer than she was when she made Dreamgirls, and she was showcased in a black-and-white zebra-striped dress with a low cleavage that was practically a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen; it probably lets her out as a possible star for a Bessie Smith biopic (I wrote in these pages not long ago that a Bessie Smith biopic with Hattie McDaniel was one of the greatest movies never made in the 1940’s, but if I were casting the role now the person at the top of my list would be Queen Latifah, not only because she’s proven she can sing old songs but in Chicago she showed she could look stunning in 1920’s costumes) but it undoubtedly helps in her current trajectory as a dance diva even though what she does best is old-school soul. The Macy’s show featured Kenny Chesney and Katy Perry — whom I quite liked, though he’s getting too old for the sing-and-rub-my-crotch bit — and both included elaborate fireworks displays. The Macy’s one was set to recordings by artists both living (including a nice recording by Taylor Swift, another pop diva of today I actually like even though I’m not exactly breaking down the doors of Sam Goody’s to collect her CD’s) and dead (Ray Charles’ incomparable recording of “America, the Beautiful” and Whitney Houston’s “One Moment in Time”), while the Boston “Pops” mostly played for itself though there were a few cut-ins of records there, too. Watching fireworks on TV really isn’t the same as being there, but it was still fun and an appropriate way to ring out the Fourth of July.

What was interesting about these shows after watching the movie Stars and Stripes Forever was that the “Stars and Stripes Forever” march appeared in both of them, and it was fun to compare the arrangements. The one in the 1952 movie was done by Fox’s musical director, Alfred Newman (whose typical Fox fanfare was superseded by Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis” march over the opening studio logo) and pretty much followed Sousa’s own except for a few bits of added percussion. The one on the Macy’s show (pre-recorded, but the chyron didn’t vouchsafe us by whom) added xylophones and annoying little tinkles, and the one from the Boston “Pops” showed that when a symphony orchestra plays Sousa they have the same problem as they do when they play big-band jazz: what the hell do you do with the strings? After that it was a relief to dig out Sousa’s own recording from the 1929 international broadcast (a stunningly complicated endeavor — Bond’s Bread had to underwrite sending recording crews out literally worldwide — of which surprisingly little survives; it’s an indication of how transitory radio entertainment was considered that even a broadcast like this made up entirely of transcription recordings wasn’t preserved) and hear “Stars and Stripes Forever” the way its composer wrote it, and though there are so few recordings of Sousa conducting himself the ones that do exist are exemplary, bringing this music the rhythmic snap it needs without making it sound overbearing.

Ready, Willing and Able (Warner Bros., 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Ready, Willing and Able, a 1937 Warners musical that represented Ruby Keeler’s last film as a Warner Bros. contractee and her co-star, Ross Alexander’s, last film, period. Alexander was a slight young man whom Warners was giving a star build-up; he was also a tormented Bisexual who hung out at restrooms when he wasn’t pursuing a decidedly unrequited crush on fellow Warners employee Bette Davis. At one point La Bette implored her then-husband, Ham Nelson, to “get rid of that fag” — which Nelson did by beating him up. At Alexander’s next tearoom cruise he was busted by the police and, while awaiting trial, he committed suicide at age 29. Ready, Willing and Able had been finished but not released when its male lead offed himself, and afraid both of potential scandal and the general willingness of audiences to pay money to see a film with a dead star (later in 1937 MGM would release Saratoga, Jean Harlow’s last movie, for which Harlow stand-in Mary Dees filled in the last week’s worth of shooting left when Harlow died, and it was a hit), Warners bounced Alexander’s billing down to fifth and co-starred Keeler with Lee Dixon, whose role had originally been planned as the comic relief.

Ready, Willing and Able was the old chestnut about the unknown who substitutes for the major star — the trope that had zoomed Keeler to stardom five years earlier in 42^nd Street — with some variations that showed just how threadbare the old formula was getting. Aspiring writer Barry Granville (Ross Alexander) and his friend, awful songwriter Pinky Blair (Lee Dixon), have somehow got Amalgamated Pictures to put up $50,000 to produce the new musical script Granville has written (presumably with songs by someone other than Pinky — the actual songwriters were Johnny Mercer, lyrics; and Richard Whiting, Margaret Whiting’s father, music) and even to let him play the male lead. The catch is that he must get London musical star Jane Clarke (Wini Shaw) for the female lead or the deal is off. J. Van Courtland (Allen Jenkins), a failed vaudevillian trying to resuscitate his career by becoming an agent (in that great Jenkins voice he moans that being an agent is the one aspect of show business he hasn’t failed at yet), rushes to meet the ship on which Jane Clarke is sailing from London to New York in hopes of signing her for 10 percent of the $1,500 per week Amalgamated is paying her. Only he signs another woman named Jane Clarke (Ruby Keeler), a college student with a stuffy fiancé named Truman Hardy (Hugh O’Connell) and a burning desire to go on the stage instead of continuing with either her studies or her relationship.

Rehearsals begin on the new show and Jane (the one Keeler is playing) predictably falls in love with Barry, and she and Pinky do a dazzling dance number at a nightclub (to the Whiting-Mercer song “Just a Quiet Evening”) to showcase and promote the upcoming production. There’s just one problem; though she’s a fabulous dancer the (American) Jane Clarke can’t sing, and she begs off any use of her vocal cords through three weeks of rehearsals until one sequence in which she’s in her dressing room, playing a record by the British Jane Clarke (on a portable phonograph owned by her roommate/pal Angie, played by Carol Hughes — the record player looks like a large hat box, especially when its lid is closed) and despairing that she’ll never be able to sing like that. Shortly afterwards she tearfully confesses all to Barry — and just then the British Jane Clarke hears about the imposture and threatens to sue Amalgamated. Amalgamated executive Edward McNeil (Addison Richards) first closes the show but then decides to keep it going if the “real” Jane Clarke can be induced to star in it ­— he dictates a telegraph to that effect to his secretary Dot (Jane Wyman in her galley years at Warners) and the real Clarke signs at $2,000 per week, while Courtland insists that Barry honor his $1,500 per week contract with Keeler’s Clarke as well. (The real Clarke is showcased by a snatch of the Whiting-Mercer song “Sentimental and Melancholy,” and while Wini Shaw had a lovely and haunting voice her attempt at a faux-“British” accent kills her ability to put over the song: a surprisingly abusive and inept treatment for a song that Billie Holiday recorded superbly at around the same time.)

There’s a final complication when McNeil and his superior at Amalgamated realize that if Barry can’t put on the show by his September 5 deadline the rights will revert to them and they’ll be able to make a picture of it, while if he does open the movie rights will come onto the open market and Amalgamated will have to bid for them along with everyone else. (What they should do is fire whoever in their legal department drew up such a cockamamie contract.) So McNeil puts pressure on the theatre and the scenery and costumes people to demand their money immediately to ensure that the show can’t open, but for reasons the writing committee (Richard Macaulay, story; Jerry Wald, Sig Herzig and Warren Duff, script) never quite explain Truman Hardy decides to put up the money, the show does open and in a cleverly staged finale — Ray Enright is the overall director, Bobby Connolly the credited dance director but the ending scene, in which the song “Too Marvelous for Words” (the one song from this production that actually became a standard) is given a baroque, over-the-top staging that’s sometimes been credited to Busby Berkeley. Featuring a giant set of a typewriter in which recumbent chorus girls’ legs form the type bars, this big number cleverly wraps it up: the “British” Jane Clarke (who has previously been revealed to be an impostor herself — the Allen Jenkins character recognized her as his former vaudeville partner, Amy Callahan, with whom he did an act with a trained seal, and there’s a great gag scene in which he recognizes the seal coat she’s wearing as their former co-star!) plays Barry’s secretary and takes dictation on a letter he sends the American Jane Clarke on another set, and the giant typewriter with chorus-girl type bars spells out, “I am sorry,” reconciling Barry and Jane both personally and professionally.

Serviceably directed by Enright from an O.K. script, Ready, Willing and Able has its charms, but Warners’ lack of faith in Keeler as a box-office attraction is all too obvious not only in the whole gag about her not being able to sing (she had sung, competently if not spectacularly, in 42^nd Street and several of her other films) but in palming her off with the all too visibly nellie Ross Alexander as her co-star instead of Dick Powell (and if he’d played the Alexander role it would have helped this movie a lot). Keeler’s career faded out after this movie: RKO signed her to co-star with Fred Astaire in A Damsel in Distress but then decided she wouldn’t be believable as a British girl (an odd commentary on her performance in Ready, Willing and Able, in which her British accent is reasonably convincing but comes and goes with virtually every scene until her character is exposed — and also ironic because Keeler was Canadian in real life!), so instead they used up her one commitment with a movie called Mother Carey’s Chickens that both Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers had turned down. At the same time Keeler’s famous marriage to Al Jolson was dissolving, so after one more film (Sweetheart of the Campus: Columbia, 1941), she remarried and retired, though she made a brief comeback after her second husband died in 1969, doing a Warners movie called The Phynx in 1970 and making headlines reunited with Busby Berkeley in a 1970 Broadway revival of the 1920’s stage hit No, No, Nannette. She turned up in San Diego in 1988 attending the opening night of the Starlight Theatre’s production of the stage version of 42^nd Street (I was there and noted that she was even wearing her hair the same way she had in 42^nd Street; she looked like her character from the movie as she would have naturally aged) and died five years later at age 82 in Rancho Mirage.

Fugitive at 17 (Ontario/Quebec/Lifetime, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on the Lifetime TV-movie Fugitive at 17, which appeared from the title to be yet another in their sensationalistic series of melodramatic thrillers about young people (mostly women) put into dire situations while still in their teens — Dead at 17, Accused at 17, Mom at 16 — but turned out to be quite good. It was pretty obvious that director Jim Donovan and writers David DeCrane and Douglas Howell had studied Alfred Hitchcock, for Fugitive at 17, despite the preposterous title, was a classically Hitchcockian tale of an innocent accused of murder who realizes her (in Hitchcock’s films it was usually a he, but this being Lifetime it was a she) only chance of clearing herself of the crime is to flee the police and find the killer on her own. The innocent young woman is Holly Hamilton (Marie Avegeropoulos), a high-school senior, a whiz at computer hacking (she’s built her own super-laptop which she carries with her on her flight and which almost becomes a character in its own right) and a chunky but attractive young woman with huge red streaks in her otherwise black long hair which makes her look like a countercultural bad-ass even though she’s really a good girl and it’s her best friend Blake (Cindel Chartrand) — that’s right, a girl named Blake — who’s the bad girl. Six months before the action started, Holly and Blake were both put on probation for illegal possession of prescription drugs; Holly took the rap to protect her friend even though the drug tests on both women turned up negative on Holly and positive on Blake. At the start of the story, Blake invites Holly to a wild party at a club, where Holly hooks up with a nice kid named Dan Dalton (Daniel Rindress Kay) while Blake gets picked up by a no-good rotter who slips her a drug that interacts with her anti-depression medication, causing her to suffocate and die. The guy then overpowers Holly and force-feeds her some of the drugs, so when the police come they arrest Holly for manslaughter on the assumption that she and Blake were doing drugs together and Holly let her friend die.

Holly’s case is handled by a tough police detective named Cameron (Christina Cox) who initially doesn’t believe her story — and she works on the force (the story is nominally set in Philadelphia but the film was shot in Canada — indeed, the only production company credits I could actually read were the Quebec and Ontario film boards) with her ex-husband, who’s even more skeptical. One twist in the story is that Holly’s parents are dead; she’s been living with her grandmother, whom she (and everybody else) simply calls “G.M.,” but her grandmother is so sick Holly is essentially her caregiver (this part of the story seemed like a busman’s holiday to me!) and she’s used her hacking skills to cut through the insurance company bureaucracy and get G.M. the meds she needs … which Blake was stealing for her own recreational use, which is what got Holly into trouble and on probation in the first place. Holly is put in a police van and taken to juvenile hall, but she escapes when the van is hijacked by a gang interested in freeing one of the other prisoners (earlier there was a rather sour line about the risks of transporting adult and juvenile prisoners in the same van, but because of budget cuts that’s something they’re going to have to live with), and later she’s cornered in the hallway of her high school but she escapes again when the class bell rings and the halls are full of students that provide her cover from the police. Later she traces Dan and the two get together and look for the real killer, who had unusually long fingernails for a man. They decide, based on what Holly overheard him tell Blake, that he’s a teacher at Central University (he’d said he was in college but was not a student), and they figure he’s probably a music teacher because guitar players frequently grow their fingernails long on their strumming hands so they won’t need picks.

After identifying one false candidate, they zero in on Spencer Oliphant (Casper Van Dien, the one cast member in this I’d actually heard of before) and she decides that the only way she’s going to get him to confess is to seduce him, wiring herself in the process and having Dan record her with a satellite phone in his RV. Spencer drives her out to a deserted spot on the Old Mill Road and there’s a tense, somewhat overwrought final action scene in which she tries to defend herself with a taser, he brings out a high-powered rifle, he finds and smashes her recording device (but not to worry: she’s got another one) and she’s eventually traced by Cameron, who’s decided she believes her story and has traced “Oliphant” as Oliver Smith, a convicted sex offender from Nevada who created a new identity. Ultimately Holly grabs a gun and shoots Oliphant, and is about to give him the coup de grace when Cameron stops her — and there’s a tag scene in which G.M. is out of the nursing home in which the cops put her while Holly was on the run, the charges against Holly and Dan are dropped (though the health insurance companies Holly scammed insist that she tell them how she did it) and Holly loses a best friend but gains a boyfriend. Though the plot largely follows typical Lifetime formulae, Fugitive at 17 actually works quite well; the script makes sense and director Donovan keeps the action moving and keeps us identified with Holly throughout — and even the final scene works as an action highlight without going over into total unbelievability as so many Lifetime endings have.

The Lady Eve (Paramount, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran The Lady Eve, which I don’t think is one of Preston Sturges’ absolute best films (though one friend of mine said he thought it was his all-time favorite movie!), though that doesn’t stop it from being enormously entertaining and well worth watching. American Movie Classics commentator Nick Clooney (Rosemary’s brother and George’s father) called it “a screwball comedy,” which it really isn’t; though it has some moments of Sturges’ familiar lunacy, it’s more of a romantic comedy between Barbara Stanwyck as a professional gambler (working the steamships with her father, played with his usual drollery by Charles Coburn) and Henry Fonda as heir to an ale fortune (“Pike’s Pale, The Ale that Won for Yale”) whom she is trying to fleece. (It’s essentially the same premise as Bringing Up Baby — only instead of dinosaurs, Henry Fonda is into snakes — but the treatment is much less “screwball” and more romantic here.) The plot is nothing much — he finds out about her past and dumps her on board the boat, and she tries to avenge herself by disguising herself as an Englishwoman, seducing him into marrying her and then posing as a nymphomaniac so he’ll want to divorce her. There are some surprisingly erotic scenes for the time — notably the opening, in which she rubs her leg against his side while he’s changing her shoe; and the closing, in which Fonda confesses to his “English” wife that he can’t love her since he’s still in love with the gambler’s daughter, and she says, “But I’m married, too,” they close the bedroom door behind them — how did they ever get that past the Production Code people? — and then out comes William Demarest, as Fonda’s manservant and general protector, saying to himself — and us — “Positively the same dame!” I like Sturges better when he’s being wilder than this — i.e. Sullivan’s Travels, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and (especially) his thorough destruction of the Frank Capra myth, Hail the Conquering Hero — but The Lady Eve is a vividly entertaining film, surprisingly subtle (despite a few of the raucous slapstick scenes that were a Sturges trademark) and indicating that Sturges could put a convincing love story on the screen. — 5/31/95

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Turner Classic Movies was running a tribute to Preston Sturges last night and showing six of his eight films as a director for Paramount (when he made The Great McGinty in 1940 it was such a hit, other writers also got chances to direct — and some, like John Huston and Billy Wilder, made it a permanent promotion while others, like Ben Hecht, weren’t able to) — they left out The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and what is probably Sturges’ most underrated film, The Great Moment (a biopic of Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, co-discoverer of anaesthesia, and at once a comedy, a soap opera and a dazzling series of flashbacks that made me wonder if Sturges, hearing Orson Welles acclaimed as a great innovator for having told Citizen Kane almost entirely in flashbacks, wanted to tap Hollywood’s on its collective shoulder and say, “Wait a minute! I wrote a film almost entirely in flashback, The Power and the Glory, eight years ago!” — it was so weird and off the beaten path Paramount held its release for two years after Sturges finished it and it bombed at the box office) — and Robert Osborne made a slighting comment about Sturges’ post-Paramount output (though it contains at least one of his masterpieces, Unfaithfully Yours) in his introduction to the film Charles and I watched last night, The Lady Eve. We’d seen it together years ago and I’d seen bits and pieces since (including the first 20 minutes or so the last time TCM revived it) and I’m not sure I would call it Sturges’ greatest film — he toned down the rambunctiousness of his usual style and made his trademark genre shifts less crashingly obvious this time around — but it’s certainly a wonderful movie and indicates that Sturges’ bag of tricks stretched to romantic comedy as well as slapstick and farce.

Though Sturges wrote the script as well as directing, the original inspiration was a story by another writer, Monckton Hoffe, and I hadn’t realized before just how much this movie owes to another comic masterpiece, Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, made three years earlier (and, ironically, a major flop while The Lady Eve was a major hit). The male leads in both are personally and sexually repressed scientists who get involved with, and ultimately fall for, aggressively worldly women — only this time around it’s a snake instead of a leopard and a broken heel instead of a torn dress that bring the leads together. The man is Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), who as the film begins is boarding an ocean liner to take him from a year-long expedition in the Amazon where he’s discovered a new species of snake, a sample of which he’s bringing back with him. He’s the son of brewer Horace Pike (Eugene Pallette), who’s made a fortune selling “Pike’s Pale, the Ale that Won for Yale” — a product so popular that everyone on the ocean liner is ordering it and the stewards have to explain rather plaintively that they’ve long since run out. The female lead is Jerry Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck, top-billed), a professional gambler who travels ocean liners with her father, “Colonel” Harry Harrington (a marvelously droll performance from Charles Coburn), looking for rich suckers to take at the card table — a character that hearkens back to at least two of Stanwyck’s previous films, Ladies of Leisure (in which she played a virtual prostitute picking men up on ocean liners) and Gambling Lady (she was a cardsharp who took over the family business when her dad, who taught her everything she knew, was killed).

The encounters between Charles Pike and the Harringtons on board the ocean are deliciously written and surprisingly soft and romantic for a Sturges movie (especially one which, according to the imdb.com “trivia” page, he wrote while in Las Vegas waiting out the six weeks’ residency to obtain his third divorce), scored with instrumental versions of songs from old Paramount movies — “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Lover,” “Moonlight and Shadows” — and at one point played so completely against the usual image of the actors involved that in one two-shot close-up of Stanwyck and Fonda, Sturges and cinematographer Victor Milner give him a surprising resemblance to Rudolph Valentino. The back-and-forth continues not only in their intimate romantic moments — not surprisingly, Jerry Harrington starts genuinely to fall for her “mark” — but at the card table as well, where the Harringtons let Charles win the first few hands and Jerry, in one engagingly preposterous sequence, tries to ensure that her dad will lose to Charles even though he’s energetically cheating so he can win. Harry Harrington ends up with a $32,000 check from Charles which he crumples up and supposedly throws away — only when Jerry learns that Charles knew who she was all along (courtesy of a purser who slipped him a photo of the Harringtons from a previous voyage with a dossier on the back), she immediately hates him, encourages her dad to cash the check (which, of course, he merely palmed) and concocts an elaborate revenge scheme that takes up the second half of the film. This involves posing as “Lady Eve Sidwich,” (alleged) niece of supposed British nobleman Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith (Eric Blore — quite a promotion from being Fred Astaire’s butler!), and getting herself to be the star guest at a huge dinner party being thrown by Horace Pike. In her “Lady Eve” guise she seduces Charles and gets him to marry her — according to another “trivia” entry on imdb.com, the wedding dress Edith Head designed for Stanwyck to wear in this sequence became so popular real-life brides asked their couturiers to duplicate it.

Only they go off on their honeymoon by train, and as the journey progresses she makes up so many stories about all the men she’s supposedly had affairs with before that he ultimately gets disgusted and ends up leaving the train in mid-journey in a rainstorm — and as he exits he promptly takes a pratfall into a mud puddle. Through the entire movie Charles Pike has had a “keeper,” Muggsy (the marvelously acerbic William Demarest), hired by his dad to make sure no adventuress gets close enough to him to take him for a significant part of the Pike’s Pale fortune — and though Muggsy loses at cards himself to Gerald (Melville Cooper), Harry Harrington’s manservant, he takes his job seriously enough that he’s the only member of the dramatis personae who suspects that Lady Eve Sedwich and Jerry Harrington are the same person. Only when he tries to share his suspicions with Charles, Charles replies, “They look too much alike to be the same” — meaning that if Jerry had wanted to disguise herself as a different person she’d have changed her hair color instead of just its cut, and maybe worn tooth caps or something else more transparently obvious as a disguise. Charles noted one plot point that Sturges could have used to make The Lady Eve an even funnier movie than it is; throughout the first half Jerry Harrington is shown as petrified of snakes in general and of Charles’ specimen snake, Emma, in particular — and this would seem to be setting up a gag in the second half in which, in order to preserve her incognito, Jerry would have to put up with Emma’s presence without any outward show of fear. Instead, Emma simply wraps herself around the leg of one of the guests at Horace’s party at which Jerry’s “Lady Eve” persona is introduced — and is never seen again.

Nonetheless, despite that omission, The Lady Eve is a brilliant film, and for once Sturges is mingling romantic comedy, slapstick and farce instead of having them crash into each other (the running gag of having Charles’ elaborate dinner jackets drenched in food is especially delicious, and the topper is that Charles runs out of clean jackets, has to wear a white one, and then that gets ruined), and the ending is a delightful bit of censor-tweaking: Jerry reverts to her original persona, she and Charles disappear into a stateroom, and as he complains, “But I’m married,” she says, “So am I” — and just then Muggsy pops up outside with the last words of the film: “Positively the same dame!” Given how in 1941, the same year The Lady Eve was made, screenwriters at MGM had to rewrite the scripts of The Chocolate Soldier and Two-Faced Woman so that characters being seduced by heavily disguised partners had to know throughout the whole affair that the people trying to seduce them were really their lawfully wedded spouses, one wonders how Sturges got away with leaving it ambiguous not only for the characters but the audience as well whether Fonda’s character knew that Stanwyck 1.0 and Stanwyck 2.0 were the same person. The Lady Eve was made at a particularly happy juncture for the careers of both Stanwyck and Sturges — later in 1941 he would make Sullivan’s Travels while her films that year included two other masterpieces, Meet John Doe and Ball of Fire — and it was also a considerably better role than most of the dull so-called “comedies” Fox, his home studio, was giving Henry Fonda in between major movies like The Grapes of Wrath and The Return of Frank James. — 7/1/12