The Surrogacy Trap (Incendo, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Lifetime movie was The Surrogacy Trap, part of a weekend they were doing of stories about married (straight) couples unable to conceive and bear children in the usual fashion, and the expedients they relied on for that purpose. It was one of two “original” films given their Lifetime premieres last weekend, along with The Surrogate — which was shown just ahead of it and I didn’t watch, though I did record it when it was “premiered” the night before — and neither Lifetime’s own site nor imdb.com lists the writer for the film, but it’s enough in the Christine Conradt mold that I could readily believe that a) she wrote it (or if she didn’t, the person who did has thoroughly internalized her formulae) and b) it might as well have been called The Perfect Surrogate, since its basic plot outline is pretty much the same as Conradt’s “Perfect … ” scripts: the naïve, innocent young man/woman/couple invites a well-recommended stranger into his/her/their home/office/bed and said stranger appears competent, responsible and sane at first but soon degenerates into a monster in human form, after their riches/identity/family/sanity. The Surrogacy Trap centers around successful couple Mitch (David Julian Hirsch, not exactly drop-dead gorgeous but a good deal hotter than most Lifetime leading men) and Christie (Mia Kirschner, top-billed) Bennet (so far the only other person I can think of with the name “Bennet” with only one “t” is the old serial director Spencer Gordon Bennet). Mitch is an architect and Christie is the head of the Envy cosmetics company, and the two have everything they could want except a family. They’ve tried in vitro fertilization but Christie has already miscarried twice and she goes into a third miscarriage in the middle of a business meeting, the scene which opens the film. Advised by their doctor (Paula Costain) that it would be too dangerous for her to get pregnant a fourth time, Christie and Mitch decide to hire a surrogate to carry their baby for them. They reject the first candidate, a nice-looking redhead whose head shot makes her seem like what Charles Schultz’ little red-haired girl would look like when she grew up, because she’s already borne three surrogate children and miscarried a fourth, and they don’t want someone who seems to have made getting pregnant with other people’s children her career. The one they finally end up hiring is Mallory Parkes (Rachel Blanchard, a genuinely sexy and charismatic actress — if I were straight she’d do a lot more for me than Mia Kirschner would!), a young blonde who according to the Lifetime formula plot (what Maureen Dowd contemptuously called “pussies in peril” — though this one is part of the sub-genre in which the pussy is in peril from another pussy!) presents a glowing, gushing face to the world in general and the Bennets in particular but has a mean streak underneath and is totally demented under that.

Not only does she decide, once she’s implanted with the Bennet’s in vitro-fertilized embryo, that if she’s going to go through the rigors of nine months of morning sickness, night sweats and a belly so swollen no man will date her she’s entitled to keep and raise the baby that’s going to result from all this, she also gets obsessed with the idea that Mitch is going to leave Christie, marry her and they will raise the baby (and future ones they’ll conceive normally) together. She gets more and more vicious and clinging, she pulls stunts like asking Mitch to come over at odd hours (there’s a nice bit of worm-turning in which she tells him her bathroom pipes are leaking in an attempt to lure him over, and she actually takes a hammer and hacks away at her shower so there will be a leak, only he sends a plumber instead and the look on her face when she sees the guy at her door is just a proletarian and not her well-to-do dream man is marvelous) and putting moves on him (he doesn’t seem to notice, but his wife sure as hell does!), and when the baby is finally born two-thirds of the way through the movie she pleads with the Bennets and the hospital personnel to be allowed to hold him. Eventually she ambushes Christie Bennet on her way to a meeting at work, steals the baby and holes up with it in the Bennets’ home until both the Bennets and the cops figure out what’s happened, but before the cops come Christie Bennet confronts her on the second floor and Mallory goes over the stair railing and falls to her death, impaled on the shards of a glass coffee table and presumably killed both by the fall and the glass. (I had visions of Mitch coming home, seeing the mess and saying, “It’s O.K. I always hated that table anyway.”) It’s decently directed by Adrian Wills — whose best moment occurs during a hot soft-core porn scene in which the Bennets have rented a hotel room for a weekend getaway and are screwing in the shower while Mallory is all alone, riven both with sexual frustration and the pains of child-bearing, in her apartment, and the intercuts between the two tell us all we need to know about her desperation and her longing. Eventually the script explains that Mallory heard about the Bennets from a young woman Mitch had had an affair with, Jessica (Mylène Dinh-Robic), a friend of Mallory’s who confided in her about the married man she was seeing, including giving her the key information that he desperately wanted children and his wife couldn’t conceive any normally. So when Mallory’s boyfriend Greg dumped her over the same issue — she wanted children and he didn’t — she set her sights for Mitch and figured the way to his heart (and his bed, and his home) would be to have his and his wife’s baby for him and then somehow get her out of the way.

So far there’ve been two reviews of this movie posted on the imdb.com site, one by someone hailing it as a breakthrough for Lifetime because it was relatively sophisticated and Christine Conradt’s usual collaborator, Douglas Jackson, didn’t direct it (though frankly I don’t think it would have been much different if he had!), while someone else summed up my creepy feelings about surrogacy in general: “I think the evil person in this movie is the rich pompous woman who pays 35k to the surrogate mother like she’s a high class escort. She makes the comment, ‘I’m gonna be a mother without the baby bump’ just prior to her and her husband about to get busy.” I couldn’t agree more — though the script of this movie tries to establish that there are medical reasons why Christie can’t just get pregnant (which still begs the question of why, if the Bennets can’t have a baby normally, they don’t adopt instead — though maybe Lifetime scheduled Stolen Child, about a couple who get in trouble when they adopt a baby from Moldova who, unbeknownst to them, was stolen, was supposed to be part of the program by reminding us that adoption isn’t a panacea either), she seems all too much the sort of lazy rich bitch imagined in the early days of surrogacy arrangements, who would pay a young woman from the 99 percent to have her baby for her so she could have the experience of motherhood without having to suffer the natural consequences of it. What’s even weirder is that in the final tag scene, Christie Bennet is shown as pregnant again — and given that she’s already had three miscarriages, are we really supposed to believe that she’s going to be able to bear a second child on her own after she needed a surrogate for her first one? Just asking, folks …

Queer Activists See, Discuss “Bully” at CFAC

Surprises in 2011 Film and Community Reaction to It

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

L to R: Walter C. Meyer, Brandon Primus, Shirlynn

“We have a pretty safe space at Carlsbad High School, because we’ve had our GSA [Gay-Straight Alliance] for 10 years,” said the Carlsbad High GSA president, a student identified only as Shirlynn, at a special showing of the 2011 documentary Bully at Canvass for a Cause (CFAC) in Hillcrest February 26. “But when it started, people were so against it they would say that Mr. Dearie [the group’s faculty advisor] was a child molester and was Gay. My sister, who’s Lesbian like me, went to the same school and a teacher, Mr. Asher, scheduled an oral on the ‘Day of Silence’ [a nationwide day of action in which students agree not to speak for a day as a protest against anti-Queer bullying and bigotry], and the oral was referred to on the final exam. So people participating in the Day of Silence couldn’t get credit for the final.”

The film Bully, made in 2009-2011 by Jay Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen, is a stark documentary about the terrors certain students face in schools because, for whatever quirky reasons, they’re picked on by their peers and subjected to relentless harassment and, all too often, physical violence. It focuses on five cases — three living students and two, Tyler Long, 17, of Chatsworth, Georgia and Ty Smalley, 11, of Perkins, Oklahoma, who were driven to suicide by the constant bullying and assaults against them by fellow students. The three who survived the bullying were Alex Hopkins, 14, of Sioux City, Iowa; Ja’Meya Jackson, 14, of Yazoo County, Mississippi; and Kelby Johnson, 16, of Tuttle, Oklahoma.

The CFAC screening of Bully was followed by a dynamic and often surprising post-film discussion featuring three invited panelists. Shirlynn was one of them. The other two were Walter C. Meyer, author of the provocative 2009 novel Rounding Third — a searing portrayal of high-school bullying and homophobia that made him an in-demand speaker when a succession of suicides by Queer teens put the issue front and center in the U.S. media a year later — and Brandon Primus from Congressmember Susan Davis’s office. Primus was there to pitch the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA), which Congressmember Davis is co-sponsoring, which would make it the law that “No student shall, on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of such individual or of a person with whom the student associates or has associated, be excluded from participation in, or be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

The fact that all five students profiled in Bully are from the American heartland rather than the relatively cosmopolitan cities on both coasts might make you think that student bullying is merely a rural problem. Think again. According to the Bullying Prevention Institute (http://www.bullyingpreventioninstitute.org/Outreach/MythsAboutBullying.aspx), “Bullying occurs in rural, suburban and urban communities in all geographic regions and among children of every race and income level.” What’s more, much of the torture bullied children go through comes not only from the bullies themselves but the supposedly responsible adults who either refuse to do anything about it at all or effectively encourage it with the idea that the kids being bullied will somehow be toughened by the experience and thereby be better able to handle the stresses of the world they’ll grow up into as adults.

That attitude was reflected in a message board on the www.imdb.com Web page for Bully by Justin Truax, who started a thread called, “I’m Glad I Was Bullied — Here’s Why!” After enduring four years of bullying from fifth to ninth grade and complaining to his parents — “who went to the school, which ultimately did nothing,” Truax said — he joined a wrestling club and learned to fight back. “I said, ‘I'm done taking your **** and I'm not playing games anymore, leave me the **** alone and go masturbate or something.’ I remember saying those exact words. They laughed and went to throw the first punch, then all the training had paid off. I bobbed my head back and came back around with a right hook, square on the jaw. He dropped instantly. The other two were coming after me, so I kicked one of them in the nuts. He went down also. Finally, my bully was standing in front of me. He looked shocked. All the days where I just took it and did nothing in return, it was like he was seeing the second coming of Christ. It was now time for David to nail Goliath in the head with that little rock. Instead of that little rock, it was a nice kick to the liver and a nice knee to the head.”

Truax said the lesson of being bullied and learning to respond in kind prepared him for the adult world and its relentless competition and conflict. “In the real world, there are tons of ‘bullies’ out there and if I went through my life without any enemies or problems, the real world would eat me alive,” Truax wrote. “It’s only because of my bully that I went to those classes to get stronger and more confident. He was the catalyst. If I let my parents, my school, my teachers or my friends fight my battles for me during my life, then ultimately that would get me nowhere. It would get me a lot of pity, but it wouldn’t get me further in life. It wouldn’t get me the confidence that I needed to become a shark in this world instead of a tiny little fish.”

That’s just the problem, said Karl Ericsson of Sweden, who posted a review of Bully to imdb.com. “In a world of competition, one less competitor is a victory for the survivor,” Ericsson wrote. “We know today that it is cooperation that brlngs about development amongst humans and not competition, which only brings about degeneration and death. The American society that allows rich men to bully poor men to death is a society of apes, more or less. Actually it’s worse than a society of apes. Competition is hailed because, like this film and other occurrences show, it keeps the poor fighting each other for the crumbs from the rich’s table and keeps them from cooperating to get rid of the rich bullies. The American way of life is an abomination — get rid of it.”

Some of the participants in the discussion at the CFAC screening had similar points of view. “What’s turning our kids into monsters?” said CFAC staff member Gabe Conaway. “The system is left outside the conversation.” Conaway said that too often the class background of the bullies themselves isn’t considered. When he came out as Queer at 16, he said, “All the kids who picked on me were from poor families.”

Oftentimes, in fact, student-on-student violence begins with a bullying victim who tries to fight back and reaches a point of desperation. The massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in April 1999 is often described as the desperate fight-back of two misfit kids who got tired of being bullied — though a Slate.com article from 2004 (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/04/the_depressive_and_the_psychopath.single.html) based on a report by an FBI investigator and a psychologist suggested that Columbine shooter Eric Harris was simply a psychopath and his partner in crime, Dylan Klebold, a troubled youth Harris recruited to help him.

Bully itself shows what can happen to a student who tries to fight back against the bullies at their own level. Fourteen-year-old African-American honor student Ja’Meya Jackson of Yazoo County, Mississippi was picked on every day during her hour-long bus ride between home and school. “It all started back when school first began, and there were a lot of kids on the bus saying things about me,” Jackson said in the film. “I tried my best to tell an adult, but it got worse.” So one morning she stole her mother’s gun and took it out on the bus. Though she never actually shot anybody, she was arrested, charged with 45 felony counts including kidnapping and attempted assault, and threatened with multiple life sentences.

“At the point she takes out the gun, that’s 22 counts of kidnapping,” one of the prosecutors explained in the film. “She has 22 counts of attempted aggravated assault. She’s got 45 total felony charges facing her. And for me, there’s nothing, no amount of bullying, or teasing, or picking on, or whatever, there’s nothing, unless someone was actually whipping on this girl every day, unless someone was hitting this young lady in the head and being physically brutal to her, there’s nothing to me that justifies her taking her gun on that bus, I don’t care what it is. … Even though things came out as best they possibly could have, if you added up all the years that she could get it, it would be hundreds of years.” Eventually prosecutors backed off and dropped the charges in exchange for a three-month stint in a psychiatric hospital, but Jackson was bitter that it was she, not the people who bullied her, who was punished.

The Queer Connection

One of the things Bully documents is how overwhelmingly the problem of bullying on school campuses is linked to prejudice and hatred against Queer students and the Queer community in general. According to a report on the Bullying Statistics Web site (http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/Gay-bullying-statistics.html), “Gay and Lesbian teens are two to three times as more likely to commit teen suicide than other youths. About 30 percent of all completed suicides have been related to sexual identity crisis. Students who also fall into the Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian or Transgender identity groups report being five times as more likely to miss school because they feel unsafe after being bullied due to their sexual orientation. About 28 percent out of those groups feel forced to drop out of school altogether. Although more and more schools are working to crack down on problems with bullying, teens are still continuing to bully each other due to sexual orientation and other factors.”

“The bullying of kids who are LGBT [Queer] is probably the largest growth area in our docket,” said John Perez, head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division at a hearing on the U.S. Senate version of the Student Non-Discrimination Act in September 2011. ”This is about safety — whether it’s kids who are Gay, whether it’s kids who are Muslim, whether it’s kids who speak English with an accent, whether it’s kids with disabilities, and we have in Tennessee a case involving bullying of kids with disabilities — this is an emerging growth area, I regret to say.”

Two of the bullying victims profiled in the film, Kelby Johnson and the late Tyler Long, were openly Queer. Tyler was repeatedly called “fag,” “geek” and other epithets by his classmates. “It took a toll on him early in middle school to where he cried, and then it got to the point where he didn’t cry anymore,” his father, David Long, said in the film. “And that’s when it became difficult to truly understand what he was going through.”

Kelby Johnson is identified as a Lesbian in the film, but since then has come out as Transgender and accepted a position as an intern in the Washington, D.C. office of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN’s Web site and the Dallas Voice, a Queer paper that covered Kelby’s first public appearance as a Transgender teen, variously identify Kelby as “they” and “he.”

Ironically, of the five victims portrayed in Bully, Kelby seemed to have done the best job of “toughing it out,” maintaining their belief in themselves despite the bullying — even though the film tells us they’ve tried suicide three times and cut themselves. Kelby also vividly describes the guilt by association that leads any student who dares stand up for a victim to be bullied themselves: “I’m not welcome at church. I’m not welcome in a lot of people’s homes. I know [my friends] get called Gay just for hanging out with me.”

One of the cruelest aspects of bullying is that the same anti-Queer epithets get hauled out by virtually all bullies against their victims, whether they’re Queer or not. Alex Hopkins, whose story in the movie became the most famous one because the bullies went farther against him than anyone else — so much so that the filmmakers shared their footage of him being beaten and abused on the school bus to his parents and the school authorities — is a young man with Asperger’s syndrome, a relatively mild form of autism.

It’s only at the very end, when the filmmakers show Alex going through his school yearbook and pointing out all the girls who turn him on, that they acknowledge that he’s straight. It’s almost as if Hirsch and Lowen were leading us up the garden path, letting us assume that Alex was Queer because that’s what his bullies were calling him and then springing the trap on us in the final reel: “Ya got it? He’s straight! And you bought into what the bullies were calling him! You saw him just like they did!”

“We still have bullying,” said Shirlynn at the CFAC showing of Bully. “I haven’t put up with it since elementary school, but last year one of our students was being bullied and it was so bad — she was in P.E. and got basketballs thrown at her — a straight male had to be with her wherever she was.”

“I’ve been waiting to see this movie for a while,” said Meyer, who told Zenger’s (which interviewed him shortly after Rounding Third was published: see http://zengersmag.blogspot.com/search?q=rounding+third) that he’s been kept so busy delivering speeches about anti-Queer bullying he hasn’t had time to finish the long-planned sequel to his novel. “I wrote a novel, but I never knew it would become what it has,” Meyer said. “It came out just before the bullying crisis hit the news, and I got all these calls to speak about it.” Meyer said that some of Rounding Third came from his own experiences in high school, other parts from stories he’d heard, and it rang so true with many readers that “I got calls from people saying, ‘Did you follow me in school?’”

Along with laws making bullying a civil-rights issue, Meyer said, we also need laws like SB 48, passed last year in the California legislature, which mandated that this state’s public schools give students age-appropriate instruction about the contributions made by Queer people to U.S. and California history, politics and culture. According to a fact sheet prepared by the staff of openly Queer State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), who sponsored the law, “Only 11 percent of [Queer] students [in California] report being bullied, but that number more than doubles to 24 percent if the majority of students in a school say they haven’t learned about LGBT people.”

“If teachers teach about Gay history and culture, the rate of bullying goes down,” Meyer said. “If you have a Gay-Straight Alliance in school, bullying goes down because it completely changes the atmosphere.” Though he admires the efforts of David Long and his wife Tina depicted in the film — they channeled their grief over their son’s suicide and started a nationwide grass-roots network that holds anti-bullying rallies and tries to build awareness one school at a time — Meyer said, “It’s not the bullies or the parents going to the rallies. It’s going to take laws to stop this.”

The Naughty Nineties (Universal, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last two nights Charles and I, at least partly to get away from the heaviness of Parsifal, had reopened the 28-film Abbott and Costello boxed set from Universal and picked up the next two films in sequence. On Friday night we watched The Naughty Nineties (1945), a pretty close reworking of Show Boat that seemed to have existed mainly so Universal could make a movie with their big comedy stars and also recycle the show boat from their 1929 and 1936 versions of Universal’s classic musicals and the saloon set they’d built five years earlier (1940) for the Mae West-W. C. Fields classic My Little Chickadee. The plot of this one is pretty simple: Sam Jackson (Henry Travers) is the owner of the River Queen show boat and he has the obligatory pretty daughter, Caroline Jackson (Lois Collier), who’s his female star. His male star is vainglorious actor Dexter Broadhurst (Bud Abbott), and he’s putting on clean shows and doing good business until he’s set upon by three unscrupulous gamblers who are about to be thrown out of town. The Terrible Trio this time are Crawford (Alan Curtis, a decent if unexceptional leading man who got a lot of work from Universal around this time), Bailey (Joe Sawyer) and Bonita Farrow (Rita Johnson, who’d got a star buildup at MGM in the late 1930’s that hadn’t taken even though she was quite good, as she is here), and their plot is to get Captain Jackson into the Gilded Cage saloon and casino, where they will cheat him out of the River Queen — which they do by challenging him to a card game and then drugging him so he can no longer see the cards. (I couldn’t help but joke that instead of playing a guardian angel, this was one movie in which Travers needed one.) Dexter and Sebastian Dinwiddie (Lou Costello), who’s a sort of general assistant on the show boat as well as the drummer in the marching band, manage to get Jackson out of the casino before he’s lost the show boat altogether, but by the time they do so Jackson is into the bad guys for $15,000, for which they claim three-quarters ownership of the River Queen and insist on opening a casino aboard. They do that and rig the games, and eventually Jackson has had enough when a gamblers’ quarrel on board leads to a gunshot and he complains that his unwanted partners have turned his nice, clean show boat into a cheap saloon.

Eventually, of course, Broadhurst and Dinwiddie cotton to what’s going on and save the day; the gamblers play one last hand with Jackson for total ownership of the boat, only Crawford — who’s fallen in love with Caroline Jackson — stacks the deck in Jackson’s favor, he gets his show boat back, Bailey and Bonita get arrested and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (though, perhaps due to the Production Code, instead of ending up as a couple Crawford seems simply to disappear from Caroline’s life — they don’t get together and they don’t have the tearful farewell one would otherwise expect). Like a lot of the Abbott and Costello movies, The Naughty Nineties isn’t much as a film, though it has a certain period charm, but it lives and dies mainly on the strength of its gags. In an early scene, Lou Costello is playing a huge bass drum for the River Queen’s marching band — and he loses track of the rest of the group and starts marching down the streets alone, still banging away on his drum. Later he’s supposed to be making a cake in the show boat’s kitchen but accidentally puts a feather-filled pot holder in as one of the layers — and when the cake is served in the River Queen’s casino, everyone starts exhaling tiny feathers and it looks like it’s snowing indoors. The film’s best part is the most complete version ever recorded of the famous Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First?” routine — you know, “Who’s on first, What’s on second, I-Don’t-Know’s on third” — which was added to the film after it was edited and Universal’s executives got a look at it and decided it wasn’t funny enough. Abbott and Costello had already been doing this routine, written by John Grant (who got a co-producer credit on this one — he was also the credited producer of their immediately previous film, Here Come the Co-Eds), for almost a decade in burlesque and radio as well as a much shorter version in their first movie, One Night in the Tropics, and reportedly this routine has become so famous that a continuous loop of the performance of it in this film runs at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

There are also a couple of gags ripped off from the Marx Brothers: the “throw me a lifesaver” bit from Horse Feathers (an anachronism in this film, one imdb.com contributor pointed out, because this is supposed to be taking place in the 1890’s and Life Savers candy wasn’t invented until 1912) and the mirror scene from Duck Soup — which was actually an old vaudeville routine that before the Marxes got it had previously been filmed by Charlie Chaplin in The Floorwalker (1916). The Naughty Nineties is a bit derivative, and the Abbott and Costello routines were starting to bore audiences — which Charles could totally understand: so many of their gags were based on Abbott getting the better of Costello we actually heave sighs of relief on the rare occasions their writers were willing to let Costello get the upper hand! — but it’s charming, well made, quite funny and has a winsome performance by Lois Collier, who gets two songs, the period piece “On a Sunday Afternoon” (the film is chock full of actual 1890’s songs, including Al Jolson’s hit “Ma Blushin’ Rosie,” played as an instrumental by the show boat band during the scene in which Costello gets lost) and a new song, “I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind” by Edgar Fairchild (music) and Jack Brooks (lyrics); imdb.com says she was dubbed but not by whom. The film was written by committee, and it shows — Edmund L. Hartmann, John Grant, Edmund Joseph, Hal Fimberg and “additional comedy sequences” by Felix Adler — and directed by the Boy Named Jean Yarbrough in better form than usual; some of the scenes actually have visual distinction (though that may be as much due to the great cinematographer, George Robinson, as to Yarbrough) and the overall atmosphere is a bit richer than usual for Abbott and Costello.

Little Giant (Universal, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night we watched the next Abbott and Costello film in sequence, Little Giant, which was quite a bit different. In the chapter on Abbott and Costello in his book Movie Comedy Teams, Leonard Maltin said that this film “experimented with a new idea, splitting up Abbott and Costello.” Actually it experimented with a lot more than that! It cast Bud Abbott in a dual role and opened in the farming community of Cucamonga (unlike most Hollywood movies then, this one took place in very specific locations, all in California), where Benny Miller (Lou Costello) is just finishing a course in salesmanship from the Record Correspondence School — a gag Charles and I found hilarious today in that tacky learn-at-home “colleges” like that have made such a comeback in the modern era as “online universities,” many of which are marketed to returning veterans and suck up all their GI Bill benefits in exchange for courses they never finish and, even if they do complete them, meaningless “certificates” that don’t mean jack in the real work world. The “Record Correspondence School”’s salesmanship course comes on a seemingly endless series of short-play 78 rpm records — which Miller listens to on an old portable phonograph in the company of his long-suffering mother (Mary Gordon) and his almost as long-suffering girlfriend, mail carrier Martha Hill (Elena Verdugo). The three of them listen to a screamingly funny “graduation” record in which the unctuous voice that’s been delivering the courses all along presents an alma mater song, a pep chant and an admonition to the earner of their “B.S.” degree — “bachelor in salesmanship” (and I can’t help but think the letters “B.S.” were the writers at once satirizing the uselessness of the degree and the overall idiocy of the concept) — to “go to the largest city in your state” and use the salesmanship skills they’ve taught to get and keep a job. (Earlier, just to underscore the uselessness of Costello’s education, he’s managed to get a local passer-by to accept a crate of oranges and a jar of marmalade — but he hasn’t extracted any payment for these items.)

Our Hero manages to make it to Los Angeles, mostly by hitchhiking or sneaking rides in the backs of trucks, and he lands a job with the Hercules vacuum cleaner company (the title “Little Giant” was originally supposed to have been a reference to the model of vacuum cleaner he was supposed to sell, but nothing in the film as it stands indicates this; the working title was The Wonder Boy, which would actually have been better in indicating what the film was about) thanks to the presence of his uncle, Clarence Goodring (George Cleveland), in Hercules’ accounting department. Only Miller’s new boss, Eddie L. Morrison (Bud Abbott, clean-shaven) is not only an S.O.B. but also a crook; he’s instructed Goodring to keep two sets of books so he can conceal the embezzling he’s doing on behalf not only of himself but his vampy wife Hazel (a marvelous comic-villainess performance by Jacqueline deWit). Hazel, in turn, resents that she has to keep the marriage secret, thanks to a policy imposed by Morrison himself that no one who already has a relative in the company can be allowed to work there. Miller goes to work for Hercules as a door-to-door salesperson, but his first day is also his last; the low point of his day (and the high point of the comedy so far) comes when he demonstrates a vacuum cleaner to the imperious Mrs. Hendrickson (Margaret Dumont) and accidentally covers her and her room with soot. (An imdb.com contributor says that Dumont’s participation in this movie was arranged by its director, William A. Seiter, who had previously made Room Service with the Marx Brothers. It’s a nice story, except for one little detail: Margaret Dumont wasn’t in Room Service.)

To get rid of Miller, Morrison sends him to their Stockton office, where he’s hired by regional manager T. S. Chandler (also Bud Abbott, this time wearing a moustache and a different toupee; the real Abbott grew a moustache and wore it in the later Abbott and Costello movies), who’s as nice as Morrison is nasty. But he’s up against an office-wide quota of 25 vacuum cleaners he and his staff are supposed to sell in one week, imposed by Morrison back at the head office in L.A. — and on the last day they’re short 12 cleaners and Miller hasn’t sold a one. As a gag, office secretary Ruby Burke (Brenda Joyce), who’s in love with Miller (one of the weirder parts of this plot is how Lou Costello is drawn as the man no woman can resist), and some of the other salespeople convince Miller that he can read minds — and the next day he sells a vacuum cleaner to each of the nine women in his sewing circle, not only getting the office to its quota but posting the best one-day sales record in the history of the Hercules company. For that he’s summoned back to the L.A. office to receive an award from the company’s CEO, P. S. Van Loon (Pierre Watkin) — only Miller’s uncle has tipped him to the scams Morrison is pulling, and rather than risk having them exposed to the CEO Morrison assigns his wife to vamp Miller, drug him and keep him from attending the meeting. The plan backfires as Mrs. Morrison herself gets dosed, courtesy of a sleeping pill Miller accidentally dropped in her drink, and Martha comes to the big city to take Miller back to the farm; she has a jealous hissy-fit at seeing him with Mrs. Morrison in the adjoining twin beds that passed for marital (or extra-marital) sleeping arrangements in the Production Code era, but eventually she gets Miller back to the family farm — only Van Loon comes in person, with Ruby in tow, to present Miller a $10,000 award for his one-day sales record and an offer to set up a new Hercules regional office in Cucamonga, now that Morrison has been fired and turned over to the police and Chandler has taken over his job.

Though it has a pro forma happy ending, Little Giant is quite a departure from the usual Abbott and Costello formulae; John Grant isn’t on the writing credits list (the screenplay is by Walter DeLeon from a story by Leftist writers Richard Collins and Paul Jarrico, which may explain the mild anti-capitalist satire that appears in the plot), there’s only one big talking gag (a reprise of the “7 times 13 is 28” scene from In the Navy, only this time reversed so Costello pulls it on Abbott instead of the other way around), and for the most part Little Giant is, as Charles pointed out, a Warner Bros.-style movie about skullduggery in the business world with Abbott and Costello stuck in. It was a time when Universal was willing to experiment; not only had Abbott and Costello fallen from the peak of their popularity in 1941 (when their second film, Buck Privates, was the most popular U.S. movie of the year — a pretty amazing feat given that Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, How Green Was My Valley, Sergeant York and quite a few other deathless classics were also released that year) but they were responding to the career dip by fighting with everybody, from Universal (they were delaying the production of their films by “working to rule,” insisting on quitting at 5 p.m. every day whether they were still in the middle of a scene or not) to each other (according to imdb.com, during the filming of Little Giant Abbott and Costello were literally not speaking to each other unless they had an on-camera scene together). Accordingly Joseph Gershenson, assigned to produce Little Giant (usually he was the head of Universal’s music department but otherwise didn’t get involved in the creative side of filmmaking), concocted a story very much off the beaten path of Abbott and Costello movies, one which not only spoofed the business world but cast Costello as a Chaplin-like figure of pathos — at which he was quite good even though Universal didn’t know how to do this sort of comedy anywhere near as well as Chaplin (his own producer, director and writer as well as star) did. (Ironically, given Gershenson’s usual job at Universal, Little Giant is also one of the few Abbott and Costello movies that contains no songs.)

In Movie Comedy Teams Maltin acknowledged his admiration for Abbott and Costello but also pinpointed their major flaw: “With few exceptions, the team never strove to portray realistic characters in their films. … They never convinced audiences that the two guys they were playing were real people, worth caring about.” (The Marx Brothers didn’t either, but they were doing a very different kind of humor and didn’t need to strive to “portray realistic characters.”) Though the writing and Seiter’s direction aren’t quite sensitive enough to give him his head, Lou Costello turns in a quite remarkable performance in Little Giant, good enough that if he and Abbott had broken up right after this movie instead of a decade later, Costello could have gone on to a quite interesting career as a comic character actor. We got to see this side of Costello again in his very next film, The Time of Their Lives — a movie even farther removed from the beaten path of A&C vehicles, involving time travel, a supernatural curse and the American Revolution — and his last film (and only one without Abbott), The 50-Foot Bride of Candy Rock, a surprisingly good 1959 spoof of the then-popular “B” sci-fi cheapies (Costello’s newlywed wife is expanded to the titular proportions and he has to figure out how to shrink her again) in which Costello got another of his rare opportunities to play a genuinely sympathetic character. Costello was actually set to play Fiorello LaGuardia in the Broadway musical Fiorello! when he died of heart failure in March 1959 (the musical’s producers got Tom Bosley to replace him), a tragic end to a career that was hugely successful but also seems oddly unfulfilled.

Wagner: Parsifal (Live from the Met in HD, March 2, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday morning I got up at 6 a.m. to be ready to leave the house by 8 a.m. in order to attend a screening of the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD theatrical telecast of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Horton Plaza Cinemas in downtown San Diego. This version of Parsifal was a new production by French director François Girard and conducted by Daniele Gatti — a name that concerned me because Charles and I had previously watched a KPBS showing of his Met Aïda and he slow-poked his way for 2 ½ hours through a score Arturo Toscanini dispatched in two (and he moved so slowly through the big arias I feared for the leading singers’ ability to hold their breaths for that long). Because of its spiritually themed subject matter, including a 45-minute scene at the end of the first act that is essentially the Christian communion ritual overlaid with mythological and spiritual trappings both from ancient German mythology (Wagner based Parsifal on a medieval German epic by Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom he’d previously depicted as an on-stage character in Tannhäuser) and Wagner’s readings about Eastern religion in general and Buddhism in particular, and because Wagner himself made watching Parsifal seem like a spiritual quest in itself — he called it, not an opera, but a Bühnenweihfestspiel (which literally means “stage-consecrating festival play”), and insisted that it be performed nowhere else but at his own theatre at Bayreuth — it tends, even more than Wagner’s other works, to get performed very slowly. It’s the sort of score that, especially since relatively little actually happens onstage, tends to get conductors who believe that spirituality = profundity = slow tempi, so they crawl through it on their hands and knees and make an already long, draggy opera seem even more boring.

Charles had desperately wanted me to go to this Parsifal even though he couldn’t — yesterday was his last day of work before his vacation — and partly as a consolation prize for him and partly as a point of comparison for me I’d run Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 1982 Parsifal film for us last Thursday night. The comparison itself turned out bizarrely and not always in the ways I would have expected: whereas Syberberg cluttered up the stage with various bric-a-brac — including flags (one of them from Nazi Germany, which was a jolt even though not altogether a surprising one, since Syberberg’s two most famous films before Parsifal were the extended documentary Our Hitler and a multi-hour interview with Winifred Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law and an outspoken supporter of Hitler and the Nazis even before they took power), standards, decorations and photos, many of Wagner himself at various points in his life (and the stage set that opened to reveal the interior of the Grail Temple was a giant-sized replica of Wagner’s death mask) — Girard designed a production that quite literally had no buildings at all and precious few props of any kind. Girard also did Parsifal in modern dress, a bit of foolishness which in an interview shown during one of the intermissions he justified by saying it helped make the story “relevant” to modern times. I’d like every director who believes in that particular idiocy — the idea that a medieval quest narrative, or a 19^th or 20^th century adaptation of one, needs to be recast with the comparatively dull clothes and physical reality of our own time to be made “relevant” to today’s audience — to look at the box-office figures of the three films of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and see the evidence, literally in black-and-white, that modern audiences not only can accept a mythological narrative of olden times but that sometimes they can find that more “relevant” than it would be if it were shoehorned into the physical appearance of now.

What Girard’s ideas meant in practice is that the Knights of the Grail in Act I were all dressed in white long-sleeved shirts and black pants — ironically the same “drag” that Charles has to wear at work (indeed, when I told him about it afterwards he said, “You mean the Knights of the Grail all work at Vons?”) — and while they start out in full suits and ties, they take off their jackets, ties, shoes and socks during Wagner’s gorgeous Act I prelude so they can walk with bare feet around a set that looks like a mud flat (“cracked earth,” the stagehands who had to set it up called it). When Amfortas, the son of the ruling knight Titurel, turns up, his wound — inflicted by the spear with which the Roman soldier Longinus stabbed Jesus during the Crucifixion, which Titurel picked up in the Holy Land along with the Holy Grail (the golden chalice Jesus supposedly used during the Last Supper, though it seems way too fancy to have been a table fixture at a meal of 13 homeless missionaries in Palestine 2,000 years ago), only Amfortas let it get stolen from him by the magician Klingsor and his ally (sometimes) Kundry, whom Klingsor assigned to seduce Amfortas — isn’t directly visible but it’s bleeding all over the front of his white shirt, and it’s also getting blood onto the two Grail Knights who are standing on either side to help him move. The effect is like looking at a bunch of waiters attending to a cook who’s had a really bad accident with a meat cleaver. It also didn’t help that the Gurnemanz, René Pape, outside of his usual elaborate operatic costuming and makeup and in modern clothes bears a striking resemblance to San Diego’s current mayor, Bob Filner.

I already wrote a long comment on this opera in my post on the Syberberg film (see below) but just to give the quick-and-dirty recap: in Act I the Knights of the Grail are waiting for the “innocent fool, made wise by compassion,” who can enter Klingsor’s castle, resist its temptations, get back the spear and heal Amfortas’ wound. He is Parsifal, whom they catch outside after he’s killed a swan with a homemade bow and arrow (and Wagner, a real-life animal-rights activist and militant vegetarian about a century before that was cool, stops an already undramatic plot for five minutes so Gurnemanz can give Parsifal an animal-rights lecture), and he watches the whole Grail ceremony, says nothing afterwards, and gets sent off on a long journey by a disgusted Gurnemanz. In Act II Parsifal shows up at Klingsor’s castle, fights off a squad of knights conjured up by Gurnemanz’ magic (though we don’t see this — we only hear Klingsor describe the battle as he watches it, which seems a shame because in a modern-dress production Girard could have staged this action and had Klingsor, and us, watch it on a giant TV monitor), wards off the lubricious offerings of Klingsor’s Flower Maidens, and is about to yield to Kundry when he suddenly remembers Amfortas and his wound (indeed, in Wagner’s text it’s made clear that at that moment Parsifal has a sort of sympathy pain at the part of his own body corresponding to the location of the wound). Klingsor throws the spear at him but it hovers magically in mid-air over Parsifal, who grabs it, waves it, and thereby makes the entire magic castle disappear (presumably taking out Klingsor but not Kundry, who reappears back at Grail Central in act three, though she only gets to sing two more words, stand around a lot and croak mysteriously at the end). Act III takes place on Good Friday, some years later, in which Parsifal finally shows up back at the Grail castle, Gurnemanz doesn’t recognize him at first, but then hails his presence as miraculous; Parsifal finally touches Amfortas’ wound with the spear, heals him, takes over as king of the Grail knights, and everyone in the order who’s still left presumably lives happily ever after.

In addition to setting Parsifal in (more or less) modern times and giving the Grail Knights singularly boring costumes to wear (when I briefed Charles afterwards, he pointed out that the Grail Knights were essentially a monastic order and even if you were doing the opera in modern dress, you should still dress them in the kinds of robes monks wear now), François Girard really let out his demented imagination in Act II. As I should have been able to guess from Girard’s previous credits — he directed two movies about classical music, Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and The Red Violin, the latter, most relevantly for this discussion, being a multigenerational story about an antique violin which supposedly sounds especially good because blood was used as an ingredient in its original varnish — Girard came to Parsifal with an obsession with blood and a determination to seize on every time the word Blut (“blood”) appears in the libretto, which is quite a lot. (Indeed, it’s the persistent references to blood that usually get cited by the anti-Wagnerians who regard Parsifal as an expression of Wagner’s racism only thinly veiled as a paean to brotherhood and spiritual salvation.) While his settings for Acts I and III were basically dull — that same mud flat, only in Act III seen with holes in it supposedly representing the graves awaiting the main characters (particularly Amfortas, who between Acts I and III stops leading the Grail ceremony because he’s in so much pain he just wants to die — and he thereby kills his father Titurel, who apparently had already died but had been brought back to life by the Grail) — for Act II he came up with a lulu: a shallow pool of blood, a few inches thick, covering the entire stage floor and making both the singers and their costumes more and more bloody as they moved about during the act. Parsifal’s and Kundry’s scene together occurs on a bed borne in by supers, and they and the Flower Maidens (the six Wagner designated to sing and even more extra ones than the 10 Syberberg added in his film) stand holding metal rods and stay there during the entire attempted seduction — which one would think should have been staged with Parsifal and Kundry alone on stage and Klingsor off to one side, literally waiting in the wings until his reappearance at the very end of the act. By the time Parsifal is finished resisting Kundry’s charms the bed looks as if at least three babies have been born on it, and in an interview with the head of the stage crew shown between acts II and III he explained that they had found shaving cream was the best sort of soap with which to wash the fake blood (a mixture of water, glycerine to thicken it, and food coloring to make it red) off the performers’ feet.

By the time of the third act, the stagehands have had to pump the pool dry so it can be removed and the mud-flat set returned — this time sprinkled with white dust to represent snow (the fact that in Wagner’s text Gurnemanz spends a lot of time hailing the arrival of spring didn’t seem to matter to Girard) and pockmarked with holes that, as I noted above, were meant to represent graves and intimidated the cast members so much that after the opera ended they started their curtain calls from the back of the stage and only later gingerly advanced down the raked set to the front of the stage to acknowledge the audience’s approval. What’s even worse, the entire opera is played with the lighting (if you can call it that) at a continuous level of murk; even the Good Friday Spell in Act III, in which Wagner lightens his orchestration and therefore virtually demands that the stage lights be turned up as well, goes by without any visible change in the dimness of the stage. (Wagner had already written a similar effect for the moment Siegfried breaks Wotan’s spear with his sword in Act III of Siegfried, and most modern productions ignore that one, too.) No wonder The New Yorker classical-music critic Alex Ross called Girard’s production “nearly as inexplicable as the work itself.” The basic problem with a modern-dress production of a legendary or mythological work is that the characters and their behavior patterns are so remote from our reality that to try to shoehorn them into our reality only makes them seem more distant and less credible. Parsifal resists updating in ways operas like Traviata, Carmen and Bohème — all of which were originally set in the time periods in which they were written, and dealt with realistically drawn people in believable real-world situations — do not; as the makers of the Lord of the Rings movies realized and François Girard did not, works set in a legendary (past, future or entirely fantastic) period can sometimes speak more strongly and powerfully, and seem even more “relevant,” if they’re left alone than if they’re shoehorned into a “modern” context in which the conceits of the director become more important than the insights of the original author.

So what parts of the Met Parsifal did work? In two words: the singing. Every cast member was stronger than their opposite number on the soundtrack of the Syberberg film, and while I wouldn’t necessarily call this a “dream cast” for the work (but then the “dream cast” for Parsifal as far as I’m concerned would consist entirely of people who were active in the 1920’s and 1930’s: Lauritz Melchior as Parsifal, Frida Leider as Kundry, Friedrich Schorr as Amfortas, Alexander Kipnis as Gurnemanz, Eduard Habich as Klingsor, and Emanuel List as Titurel), it would be hard to imagine a much better cast being assembled today. Alex Ross dismissed the Parsifal, Jonas Kaufmann, as “fluid but disappointingly indistinct” — whatever that means — but I thought he gave an absolutely gripping reading of the title role even though the makeup people overdid his age makeup in Act III. (Maybe he was stronger in the world telecast performance than he’d been on the opening night, February 15, which is what Ross reviewed.) At least we got a lot of nice look-sees of Kaufmann’s bare chest — that’s one good thing about doing it in modern dress — and though he’s not exactly a hunk to die for he did a lot more for me aesthetically than the twerpy Michael Kutter did in Syberberg’s film. More importantly, Kaufmann sang the role with the kind of Heldentenor richness it needs and which Syberberg’s soundtrack Parsifal, Rainer Goldberg, didn’t (Goldberg was one of those people who thought he was a Heldentenor and really wasn’t, as he proved not only in Syberberg’s Parsifal but on a Laserlight compilation of Ring excerpts in which he vainly tried his hand at Siegmund). The duet with Kundry that takes up the last half of Act II was the best part of his portrayal — he and his Kundry, Katarina Dalayman, both tore into this part as if they were looking forward to the scene in which Parsifal’s plot and situations come closest to normal human actions, desires and emotions. Dalayman also deserves credit for coming as close as anyone can to bringing the two halves of Kundry’s character — the self-abasing servant of Acts I and III and the seductress of Act II — into a consistent whole. (It’s so hard to make Kundry a consistent character that in a 1961 production at the Vienna State Opera, conductor Herbert von Karajan, decided not even to try; instead he cast Kundry with two different singers, Elisabeth Höngen as the servant and Christa Ludwig as the vamp.) Peter Mattei was excellent as the tortured Amfortas and René Pape, despite almost inevitably looking like a prominent local politician in his white dress shirt and black slacks, handled Gurnemanz’ long monologues as vividly as possible. Evgeny Nikitin came out as Klingsor in a 19^th-century suit (so much for modern dress) and a shirt that was stained, ripped and red all over — though one got the impression, in line with François Girard’s production, that his shirt hadn’t started out red but had been stained that color by repeated immersions in the blood pool in which he lives. He too sang with power and authority, proof that the Met can still assemble an excellent cast and give them their heads despite conducting and (especially) staging that doesn’t do them justice.

I did briefly ponder the irony that a work Wagner wanted to be performed in only one theatre in the world (Wagner authorized one performance at the Munich Opera so his patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, could see what he was paying for, but only on condition that Ludwig be the only member of the audience — and by that time Ludwig was such a recluse he didn’t mind that at all!) was being beamed by modern technology to movie houses all over the world. Alas, there was a glitch in that modern technology; before the opera started we got a notice that “solar interference” was affecting the telecast from North America and would result in periodic blackouts — which did occur, and were sometimes annoying, but fortunately they were confined to the visual portion and did not affect the music (which would have been far more disconcerting). This was my first experience at a movie theatre watching a Live at the Met in HD telecast —though I’ve seen a few of them before when they were being rerun on public television — and overall I enjoyed it even though a shorter, less “difficult” opera might have been a better choice for my maiden voyage. I was amused that when I came out of the theatre the ticket-takers I passed by on my way out seemed dumbfounded — I said to one young woman, “You’re probably encountering a lot of people with glazed looks on their faces and thinking, ‘Oh, they just came out of the opera,’” and she said, “I’m just amazed that you people could sit through six hours of opera!” (Charles was amused, when I told him that story, by the phrase “you people.”)

Wagner: Parsifal (Corinth/Gaumont/Columbia, 1982)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (that’s how his name appears on imdb.com, though the DVD we were watching last night spelled his name “Hans Jurgen Syberberg” — no hyphen and no umlaut) made of Wagner’s opera Parsifal in the early 1980’s (the copyright date is 1982 but imdb.com lists it as 1983) is as enigmatic as one would guess from the standard sources’ inability to agree even on the date and the director’s name. Syberberg was one of the enfants terribles of the so-called “New German Cinema” in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, and he achieved international fame for a documentary he did in 1977 called Our Hitler: A Film from Germany. The most famous scene in this movie showed Hitler emerging from Richard Wagner’s tomb, as if he were a reincarnation of the famous and still controversial composer. There’s been a lot of nonsense about the supposed Wagner-Hitler connection written over the years, most of it cheerily ignoring the fact that Wagner died in 1883 and Hitler was born in 1888. The basic “logic,” if you can call it that, seems to go something like this: Wagner hated Jews, Hitler hated Jews, Hitler liked Wagner, therefore Wagner was responsible for all the horrors of Hitler’s regime, including World War II and the Holocaust. Parsifal was Wagner’s last opera, premiered at his theatre at Bayreuth in Bavaria in 1882 — a year before Wagner’s death (and, ironically, conducted by Hermann Levi, a Jewish conductor Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II, insisted he use) — and it’s itself one of the most enigmatic pieces ever produced by a major composer, especially one who specialized in the most openly dramatic form of music there is, opera.

In a marvelous passage from his review of the 1933 Bayreuth revival of Parsifal, future EMI record producer Walter Legge wrote, “There is in the last works of nearly every great artist a strangely luminous quality, as if the creative mind had already seen the world beyond death and were conscious of things infinitely greater than the emotional experiences of this world.” Among the examples he cited were Shakespeare’s The Tempest (which in 1933 was still believed to have been Shakespeare’s last play, though the current edition of the Oxford Shakespeare includes a later one, The Two Noble Kinsmen, co-credited to Shakespeare and John Fletcher), Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s last string quartets, Brahms’ Four Serious Songs, and Wagner’s Parsifal — and Parsifal has at least one other thing in common with The Tempest: for works by people acclaimed as master dramatists, they’re pieces in which almost nothing actually happens. The big dramatic event in The Tempest — the tempest itself — happens midway through Act I, and Shakespeare seems totally uninterested in it except as a dramatic device to get his “outside” characters stranded on Prospero’s island. The big dramatic event in Parsifal actually happened in the backstory: a group of Crusaders recovered two key relics of the last days of Jesus, the chalice that held the wine in the Last Supper and the spear with which the Roman soldier Longinus pierced Christ’s side during the Via Dolorosa. They settled in Spain and built a castle called Montsalvat, where they set up a combination knightly camp and monastic order built on celibacy, vegetarianism and an elaborate ritual by which the chalice — which they also refer to as the Holy Grail even though there have been so many real-life objects associated with that term it’s easy to lose track of them (and that’s not to get into the French myth, well known now because Dan Brown used it in The Da Vinci Code, that the term “San Greal” — “Holy Grail” — was merely a misspelling of “Sang Real,” French for “Royal Blood,” referring in this context to the descendants of the children Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene supposedly had after they escaped the Crucifixion and settled in France) — is revealed (or “disclosed,” as the rather dorky titles in this edition — which include such bizarre typos as “forfity” for “fortify” and “thoo” for “thou” — have it), and a white dove flies down from heaven (or wherever) and perches on the side of it to indicate that the knights of Montsalvat are still in the good graces of God.

Only by the time the opera starts they aren’t anymore because Klingsor, who became a Grail-knight pledge but found he couldn’t handle the chastity bit, slashed off his dick and balls and attempted to convince Titurel, the founder of the order, that by doing this D.I.Y. castration he’d proven himself worthy. Of course Titurel saw through this nonsense immediately, so the self-emasculated bad guy set up a “Magic Castle” next door with phantom warriors, lusty Flower Maidens and his top seductress, Kundry — and with all of these he managed to lure Titurel’s son and heir, Amfortas, to his lair, where Kundry seduced him and Klingsor managed to get the spear of Longinus away from Amfortas, stabbed him with it and sent him back to Montsalvat with a wound that no medicine can heal or even relieve the pain of for long. The prophecy of Gurnemanz, who’s essentially the prime minister and historian of the Grail order (and gives us the backstory in a series of extended monologues that make him even more of a “crashing bore,” to use Anna Russell’s words, than Wotan in the Ring), is that only an innocent young man, a “perfect fool,” can successfully resist the temptations of Klingsor’s castle, get back the sacred spear and get Montsalvat back to normal again. The innocent man is Parsifal, who like so many of Wagner’s other heroes is an orphan — his father Gamuret was killed in battle before he was born and his mother, Herzeleide (the name means “heart’s sorrow” in German), sent him away while he was still a boy and, unbeknownst to him, died soon after. Wagner’s obsession with male protagonists who grow up not knowing who they really are and often don’t learn their own names until they are already adults — Siegmund, Siegfried, Tristan, Parsifal — has direct roots in his childhood: when he was born his parents of record, Carl Friedrich Wagner and Johanna Paetz Wagner, had a boarder named Ludwig Geyer living with them. Carl Friedrich Wagner died six months after Richard was born, and his mother Johanna later married Geyer. For the first nine years of his life Richard was known as “Richard Geyer” — a name he hated both because it sounded Jewish and “Geyer” is also the German word for “vulture” — until he insisted on taking the name Wagner. Wagner himself probably never knew which of the two men in his mother’s life was his biological father, and his biographers are still arguing about it.

Anyway, Parsifal comes to Montsalvat when one of the knights there catches him shooting and killing a swan — and Gurnemanz stops the opera’s plot, such as it is, dead in its tracks for about five minutes to give Parsifal, who since his mom bailed on him has been making his living by shooting small game with a bow and arrow and using them for food (in some ways he starts out as a male version of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games), an animal-rights lecture. (The real Wagner was an animal-rights vegetarian about a century before it was cool.) Parsifal watches the entire ceremony of the unveiling of the Grail, but when it’s over and Gurnemanz asks him to comment on what he’s seen, he says nothing and Gurnemanz calls him a goose and sends him on his way. The implication is that Parsifal will have to wander throughout the world learning the hard way what he could have known easily and quickly just by asking Gurnemanz what the ceremony was about. In act two, Parsifal turns up at Klingsor’s castle — where Kundry, who seems to shuttle back and forth between Montsalvat and Klingsor’s place, and between devoted servant of the Grail knights and their reluctant despoiler (like Lola in the musical Damn Yankees, she’s good at seduction but she’s also weary of it), and she tells Parsifal his name — which he’s only heard once before (“Once in a dream I heard my mother call me that,” he says) — and breaks the news that his mom is dead, then moves in for the kill — only the moment she’s kissed him and he’s touched her breast, he screams in agony, remembering Amfortas and his wound and himself hurting in the same place. At the end of Act II, Klingsor throws the spear of Longinus at Parsifal, only the spear magically hovers over him; he grabs it in mid-air, and as he waves it Klingsor, the Flower Maidens and the entire castle disappear. (This would have been a difficult effect for the 19^th-century stage but hardly an impossible one, given a theatre with the state-of-the-art machinery Wagner’s had.) In Act III, which takes place on Good Friday, Parsifal makes his way back to Montsalvat and finds that Amfortas has suffered so much he no longer allows the Grail ceremony to take place, and as a result his aging father Titurel has finally died and the whole community has sunk to a level of self-pity and overall uselessness. Even Kundry has worked her way back there, though she only gets two words in this act — when Gurnemanz comes across her and asks why she’s come back, she says, “Diene, diene,” which means, “To serve, to serve” — and at the end Parsifal saves the day when he realizes that the only way Amfortas’s wound will ever be cured is if he touches it with the spear that made the wound in the first place. Accordingly, he does so, Amfortas is magically healed, Parsifal is hailed as the new rightful ruler of the order and everybody who’s left presumably lives happily ever after except Kundry, who falls dead for no particular reason. (This happened to a lot of Wagner’s female leads, including Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, Elsa in Lohengrin and Isolde; his male protagonists died of specific, material causes but his women just expired on cue.)

Wagner dresses up this plot with a lot of philosophical and spiritual depth; though the overall text of Parsifal is basically Christian, some of it reflects his growing interest in Buddhism (though he didn’t actually work on it beyond a basic outline, the next opera Wagner had planned was Die Sieger — “The Victors” — either a bio-opera of Buddha or a story about European pilgrims who travel to India and learn the lessons of Buddhism at its source), specifically the concept of reincarnation. At the start of Act II we learn from Klingsor that Kundry has lived several lives under different names, and she herself later tells Parsifal — in the closest thing she gets to an aria, “Ich sah das Kind,” that in one of her incarnations she was in Jerusalem when Jesus was crucified and she laughed at his sufferings on the Cross. Wagner’s main literary source for Parsifal was a long, rambling but fascinating medieval German epic poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach, a real-life knight who was also a Minnesinger (a medieval German troubadour) and who had previously appeared as an on-stage character in Wagner’s Tannhäuser (as the nice, morally upright guy who’s Tannhäuser’s rival for Elisabeth’s affections and who sings her the famous Song to the Evening Star), but the knights in Wolfram’s Montsalvat ate meat and fish, had girlfriends, got married, had sex and had children — as Nietzsche rather snottily pointed out in The Case of Wagner (Nietzsche’s break with Wagner had already started before Parsifal but that led Nietzsche to believe he’d been right to do so; in one note he wrote that “Wagner is asking the same questions that I do, but instead of my answers he’s giving the Christian answers”), if Parsifal had to take a vow of chastity to rule Montsalvat, just how was his son Lohengrin — the protagonist of a previous Wagner opera (based on another author’s sequel to Wolfram’s poem) — conceived and born? Aside from the Wagner connection, Wolfram’s Parsifal (which is much more wide-ranging dramatically than the opera) is fascinating and worth reading because Wolfram was himself a traveling knight, and his poem is one of the few documents we have from someone who was actually a medieval knight of what a knight’s life was like.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg took what was already a pretty convoluted story with an ambiguous moral lesson — taken on face value it’s a Christian parable of morality and the power of brotherhood, but critics (including Wagner’s great-grandson Gottfried, who broke with the family and wrote a singularly bitter memoir in which he said that the Ring and Parsifal should no longer be performed because they expressed anti-Semitic messages that later inspired Hitler and the Nazis) have argued that with its obsession with blood and moral purity, it’s really a racist work — and really went to town on it. Instead of simply filming an opera performance he decided to make the film as a movie, shooting to a pre-recorded soundtrack and mostly using a different cast of actors than the people who actually sang on the records. He cast three actors as Parsifal, one (David Luther) to play him as a child in an elaborate prologue, set to the opera’s opening prelude, which gives some of the backstory (though in a confusing way that would probably not be helpful, or particularly comprehensible, to someone who didn’t know it already) in an elaborate mix of live actors, models and puppets. The two adult Parsifals are Michael Kutter, who’s given an elaborately embroidered brown frock coat that looks like the costumes Tom Hulce wore as Mozart in the Amadeus movie (actually made two years later) but otherwise looks like a rather seedy rock star on the downgrade, complete with a mop of curly hair; and Karin Krick. Yes, that’s a woman — and typically for modern directors of opera on stage or film, Syberberg doesn’t give us a clue as to why the sex change (especially since Reiner Goldberg, a tenor who had his 15 minutes in the early 1980’s until he blew his career by walking out of the gala performance of Weber’s Der Freischütz that was supposed to reopen the Semperoper in Dresden 40 years after it had been destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II, though since the record was made at the dress rehearsal he got to be on it, infuriating his on-stage replacement, Klaus König, sings Parsifal throughout); it happens when Karin Krick walks up behind Michael Kutter in the middle of the scene with Kundry (played on-screen by Edith Clever, voiced — superbly — by Yvonne Minton) and takes over, and though Kutter reappears at the end of the act it’s Krick who shows up at Montsalvat in Act III, with Kutter reappearing again towards the end and one bizarre shot in with both are on screen synchronizing to the single voice of Reiner Goldberg on the soundtrack. It’s not clear what that means, or why images of Richard Wagner at various stages of his life — including a bizarre set that’s a several-times life-size reproduction of Wagner’s death mask that opens to reveal the interior of Montsalvat’s castle — keep showing up in this movie (including as part of a Sgt. Pepper-like collection of heads in Klingsor’s castle that also includes Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Nietzsche) to the point where it almost starts to feel like a new version of Where’s Waldo?: Where’s Wagner?

 Syberberg doesn’t really take a position as to whether Parsifal is a positive tale about brotherhood and the power of love or a piece of racist propaganda expressing Wagner’s hatreds of supposedly “inferior” races in general and Jews in particular, and though he’s famous for his depiction of Germany’s connection to the Nazis and the Nazis’ connection to Wagner (between Our Hitler and Parsifal his main project was a five-hour interview with Winifred Wagner, widow of Wagner’s son Siegfried and the Wagner family member who regularly invited Hitler to Bayreuth in the first place, thereby giving him cultural cachet and respectability well before he took power; and in his book Gottfried Wagner said that after the interview film with his grandmother, Syberberg turned against his opposition to Nazism and became part of the Wagner-Hitler combine he was trying to expose) there’s only one brief glimpse of a Nazi flag along with other flags and standards in a back room at Montsalvat. Syberberg’s Parsifal was ballyhooed as a major intergenerational collaboration between two artists of genius — a blurb on the DVD box quotes Post-Courier (of what city? We’re not told) music critic J. L. L. Johnson as calling the film “one genius coming to grips with an older genius to create a new work of art” — a sentiment I remember having about a quite different film, Abel Gance’s 1936 A Great Love of Beethoven (which really did seem less a biopic of Beethoven than one genius-level artist paying tribute to another) — which it isn’t. Some of Syberberg’s ideas work vividly and amplify Wagner’s message (whatever it was) in legitimate interpretive ways — like the decay that has already set in at Montsalvat at the beginning (even though that meant he and his set designer, Werner Achmann, had to work harder than usual to make it look even seedier for Act III) and the fascinating treatment of Kundry, who comes on looking like an Egon Schiele painting and actually looks younger in each succeeding act. Some of his ideas are just silly, like the Transgender casting of one of the Parsifals, and some of them seem to have some relevance to the drama and how we have to see it in today’s world — like the multiple Wagners — but don’t really come off that well.

I wouldn’t call Parsifal a bad movie; for what works (or doesn’t), overall it’s a quite compelling transformation of a major opera into the world of film. It doesn’t work as well as Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute (but then Bergman — who, it occurred to me, was one director who probably could have done justice to Parsifal — seized on The Magic Flute as a way to lighten up his filmmaking and came up with a charming movie that cut back and forth between straightforward dramatization of the story and depiction of how The Magic Flute would have been performed on stage when it was new). It’s done respectfully to the music — unlike the slashing cuts that disfigured Franco Zeffirelli’s films of Verdi’s La Traviata and Otello, Syberberg’s Parsifal presents the score complete except for the excision of the Act III Prelude (probably because Syberberg didn’t want to have his movie come to a dead stop for another puppet show or something to fill up the visual gap of a long instrumental passage). He wasn’t necessarily helped by his conductor, Armin Jordan, who recorded the soundtrack in Monte Carlo in 1981 (with a boys’ chorus imported from Prague — which fascinated Charles because the Cold War was still going on then) and who, quite frankly, plodded through music that could have used a lot more oomph. Parsifal is an odd work and a difficult one to stage because the first and last acts are virtually plotless — it’s really the closest Wagner ever came to writing an oratorio — while the second act has some of the old dramatic fire. Or at least it should, and it does in the truly great performances — like James Levine’s Met broadcasts in 1979 with Jon Vickers as Parsifal and in 1995 with Plácido Domingo — in which he turns the duel of wits involving Parsifal, Kundry and Klingsor into tough, fast-moving drama to offset the static nature of the first and last acts. The Charfreitagszauber (“Good Friday Spell”) in the last act, in which Gurnemanz and Parsifal sing a duet of praise for the miracle that has brought him back as Montsalvat’s redeemer on that holy day, should be an irresistible blast of energy that changes the mood of the piece from darkness to light. That’s what you can hear in the 1927 rendition from Bayreuth, conducted by Wagner’s son Siegfried and taken down by Columbia Records’ engineers in sound surprisingly rich, deep and transparent for the time, with Fritz Wolff as Parsifal and probably the best singer ever to play Gurnemanz, Alexander Kipnis. In Jordan’s version, it’s just more depressing mopery despite the excellent singing of Robert Lloyd, who (along with Aage Haugland as Klingsor) is one of the few people in this film who got both to sing their part and to act it on-screen.

Some of Syberberg’s more eccentric casting and costuming decisions don’t help, either; Titurel (Martin Sperr, voiced by Hans Tschammer) actually looks younger than his “son” Amfortas, and is made to look like the Ghost of Christmas Present in the 1951 Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol. Klingsor actually strongly resembles Wagner’s Wotan, another protagonist who cut out part of his body (his eye) hoping it would bring him enlightenment, and who’s shown in an awful lot of poses sitting in a throne, holding his spear regally in front of him — the kind of influence-seeking between Wagner’s operas that actually began with Wagner himself: before he wrote the texts for the Ring he wrote an essay called Die Wibelungen: World History as Told in Saga that contains a section called “The Transformation of the Ring into the Grail” — so critics like Stewart Robb who call Parsifal “the fifth and final act of the Ring” actually have a point. (Robb’s analysis is that the Ring is about the failure of a violence-prone hero, Siegfried, to redeem the world, and that it takes a nonviolent one like Parsifal, armed not with a magic sword but a sacred spear he dare not use in battle, to accomplish the task.) Indeed, at one point Wagner planned an even weirder connection between Parsifal and another of his works; he briefly considered writing a scene into Tristan und Isolde in which Parsifal, on his pilgrimage through the world, would encounter the delirious Tristan on his deathbed in Kareol, Brittany, and the experience would teach him … well, something. But the odd connection Syberberg makes between Wotan, who for all the scummy things he’s willing to do to get and keep power as king of the gods is basically a sympathetic and even tragic figure; and Klingsor, who’s out-and-out evil (I suspect Wagner intended us to see him as a sort of latter-day Satan, cast out of Montsalvat the way Satan was from heaven), is one of those gimmicks that seems thought-provoking enough but doesn’t really mean anything.

And one odd thing about Syberberg’s direction is that he avoids staging scenes that Wagner clearly intended that were difficult to do on stage but would be absurdly easy in films. The Transformation Scene — the part in Act I in which Parsifal and Gurnemanz arrive at the Grail ceremony from the outside of Montsalvat without actually having to move (“Here space and time are one,” Gurnemanz explains to Parsifal in words that some especially ardent Wagner fans have used to suggest he anticipated Einstein’s theory of relativity) — is done with a few projected images passing behind Gurnemanz and Parsifal as they walk pretty normally around the Wagner’s death-head set. (In 1882 at Bayreuth, Wagner had Gurnemanz and Parsifal walk on a treadmill while a long backdrop painting on rollers unrolled behind them. It took the stagehands longer than anticipated to roll the backdrop from one point to the other, and so Wagner’s assistant, future composer Engelbert Humperdinck, marked a seven-bar repeat in the score just to keep the music going until the scene change was complete — which gave rise to the oft-reported rumor that Humperdinck actually composed seven bars of Parsifal.) Syberberg’s staging of the end of Act II — instead of throwing the spear at Parsifal, Klingsor simply collapses, and his castle remains intact (and we don’t see Parsifal pick up the spear, either, though presumably he does because he has it in Act III, along with a standard with a cross on the end of it) — was so confusing that at the end of it Charles asked me, “What just happened?,” and I answered him with an account of the end of the act as Wagner wrote it.

In Act III both Parsifals (pre- and post-op) show up, the boy Parsifal with the spear and the girl Parsifal with the cross-headed standard (or was it the other way around?), and the Parsifal with the spear doesn’t get it anywhere near Amfortas — and for a film which had treated (if that’s indeed the word) us to some pretty raw shots of Amfortas’ open wound, Syberberg ignored the effect, easy to do on film, of having Parsifal touch Amfortas’ wound with the spear point and thus get it to close up and heal at long last. There are quite a few interesting touches — including a part of the set of Klingsor’s castle that’s a cross but at the base of it is a round rock formation that looks like a scrotum (so it represents both the cross and Klingsor’s severed dick) — and such typical examples of movie inflation as having 16 flower maidens instead of Wagner’s six, and three squires (apprentice knights) at Montsalvat where Wagner was satisfied with two. But overall Parsifal makes its effect from the grandeur of Wagner’s music, the generally capable performances of the singers (particularly Lloyd and Haugland on-camera and Minton off-camera — about Goldberg the less said the better; like so many tenors who get cast in Wagner’s operas these days, he makes it through the role and he doesn’t embarrass himself too badly, but Melchior, Vickers or Domingo he is not) and a production that may nibble on the edges of outrageousness but doesn’t go over the top the way, say, the current Bayreuth Lohengrin (which recasts the opera as a B. F. Skinner experiment in behaviorism and accordingly makes the chorus members into rats, complete with rat suits) does. Despite the épater-les-bourgeois aspects of Syberberg’s direction (I think there’s been enough of this sort of thing in the last four decades that les bourgeois, at least the ones that still go to operas, are pretty un-épater-able anymore) Parsifal makes enough of an effect that after it was over, Charles said, “Now I know what makes white people want to be Christians!”