by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. I watched the first installment of what’’s
being billed as a three-part Lifetime movie called “Thrillogy” (a truly
dreadful pun) shown under the umbrella title Obsession — I’m tempted to joke that one could hardly find a
Lifetime movie for which Obsession
would not be a suitable title.
This first episode was called Obsession: Stalked by My Lover, and the central character is a young photography
student named Madison Turner (Celeste Desjardins, whom I’ve seen on Lifetime
credits before and is a good enough actress to put at least some meat on the clichéd bones of the typical Lifetime
heroine) who’s in an unfulfilling relationship with boyfriend Dylan Seeble
(Jason Hicks) — she’s considering leaving him because he lives in a frat house
that always reeks of beer and other young-male odors (and though the
screenwriters probably weren’t intending this at all, I found myself wondering
if he was supposed to be Gay and have a crush, unrequited or otherwise, on the
older student who’s his “frat brother” Ronnie Munn, played by Nicolas James
Wilson) and, though at one point they sleep together at her place, that’s all they do: they fall asleep, both fully dressed, in
her bed. Madison’s African-American best friend (oh, no, not another African-American best friend!), Rachel Kingston,
counsels Madison when her roommate abruptly moves out and her roommate ad on
her phone is answered by three people, two women and one man. On Rachel’s
urging, Madison picks the man even though we know, though she doesn’t, that he’s really a
particularly vicious crook who’s currently going by the name “Blake Connors”
but has had others. He moves in with Madison and at first they’re just supposed
to be roommates — though Madison’s sort-of boyfriend Dylan is instantly jealous
and suspicious of him — but eventually the combination of proximity and hotness
(and Travis Nelson, who plays Blake, is way better looking than Jason Hicks even though he oddly doesn’t seem
to have much in the basket department) works its way on Madison and the two end
up pumping away at each other (even though this time around director Alexander
Carrière doesn’t show much of the soft-core porn that makes so many Lifetime
movies fun).
When Madison isn’t at home doing the down ’n’ dirty with her new
“roommate” or working late at night in the campus darkroom (it’s established
that she has a digital camera but prefers to do her more “artistic” projects on
film), she’s got a problematic relationship with her family in general and her
sister, Evie Brotman (Kelly Hope Taylor), in particular. It seems their parents
died in an accident when Madison was 10 and Madison expected her 15-year-older
sister to take her in; instead Big Sis felt too overwhelmed to take
responsibility for raising a child and palmed her off on their grandparents.
The grandparents are just about to have their annual policy and Madison is
looking forward to it being at a restaurant, but instead Evie insists on
hosting it herself. Dylan is supposed to pick up Madison and be her “date” to
the party, but he doesn’t show because that afternoon he and his “frat brother”
Ronnie decide to go for a hike at the nearby Angel’s Path, and they can’t get
back in time because Blake has followed them out there and stolen it. Actually,
he hasn’t stolen it himself; he’s just reported its location to pawnshop owner
Darryl Wallace (Michael Dickson), his contact for a ring of car thieves for
whom Blake stalks stealable vehicles as his primary source of income — though
he’s also often asking Darryl to stake him for other sorts of criminal ventures
and Darryl is always putting out his hand to demand a cut. When Dylan doesn’t
show to pick up Madison and take her to her grandparents’ party, Blake drives
her there as his guest and surprisingly makes a good impression. He makes a
particularly good impression on Evie, who buys into Blake’s phony identity as a
home security consultant and offers him $5,000 to bug her bedroom so she can
catch her husband Kirk (Tomas Chovanec) having sex with his office assistant in
the marital bed. Evie also introduces Blake to her neighbor Jenna Rothstein (a
quite good Sophie Gendron), who took her ex-husbant to the cleaners after she
caught him cheating and now has
their house and a large fortune so she doesn’t have to work and she spends her
time cruising younger, cuter guys and having sex with them. Jenna sets her
sights on Blake the moment she first eyes him, but what he’s really interested in Jenna is not sex (after all, he’s
regularly screwing the far younger, cuter Madison!) but the expensive jewelry
she’s collected over the years and hidden in a safe in her bedroom.
Blake
accepts Jenna’s offer of a job putting in a new home security system, but he
also includes a camera in her bedroom aimed at the safe so he can get footage
of her opening it and read off the combination, so later he can break in and
burglarize her. Only Evie gets suspicious of Blake when he gets the footage of
her husband screwing his girlfriend but holds out for an additional $15,000 to
give her the tape — otherwise he’ll sell it to Kirk as evidence that his wife
is spying on him and she’ll likely get divorced but with no money. Dylan — ya remember Dylan? —
also gets suspicious of Blake and traces him to Jenna’s and to the pawnshop,
addresses he records on the “notebook” feature of his cell phone, but like all
too many stupid movie characters in the past, instead of taking down his
information and leaking it quietly to the police, he confronts Blake directly.
Blake pulls a gun on Dylan and forces him into Dylan’s own car — he intends to
drive Dylan out to Angel’s Path, kill him and fake it to look like a hiking
accident. Only his scheme unravels when Dylan’s friend Ronnie decides to give
Madison Dylan’s camera and his phone, and the camera includes photos of Dylan
being menaced and held at gunpoint by a driver whose face cannot be seen but
who has a logo on his sweater Madison later recognizes as Blake’s. The night
Evie’s neighbor Jenna leaves town for a conference in New York, Blake duly
breaks into Jenna’s home, opens the safe and steals the jewels. Evie calls the
police on 911 but the only cop who shows up is a bald Black guy in a patrol car
who knocks on the door, gets no response and drives away again. She finally
reaches Madison and warns her that Blake has just burglarized Jenna’s safe and
is probably coming there to flee the country and take Madison with him. This time the police are on the ball and stake out
Madison’s place, and though Madison narrowly escapes death when Blake realizes
she’s betrayed him and pulls a gun on her, ultimately the police arrest Blake
and Madison and Evie agree to move in together now that she won’t have a
husband much longer and the two sisters have patched up their differences now
that both of them have been
involved with no-good men.
The finale shows Blake being taken to prison in the
proverbial orange jumpsuit (stripes are so 20th century!), but a promo for the next film in the
series, Obsession: Escaping My Ex,
reveals that Blake escapes from prison, killing a man in the process, and comes
after Madison again out of little more than Melissa Cassera’s authorial fiat.
Christine Conradt was listed as one of the four “executive producers” on this
film but, alas, didn’t take a direct hand in writing it: if she had, Blake
would probably have been a more complex character and we’d have had a much
better idea of What Made Blake Run. About the only clue we get as to what
motivated Blake to a life of crime is that his sister, whom we see in one quite
powerful scene, is in a mental institution, where either private insurance or a
public program covers her room and board but everything else, including her
meds, Blake has to supply — yet another (probably) unwitting piece of Lifetime
propaganda in favor of single-payer: “If we had Medicare for All, the crime
rate would go down because people wouldn’t have to become criminals to pay for
their relatives’ health care” — an argument I don’t think even Bernie Sanders
has used for it! As it stands, Obsession: Stalked by My Lover is an O.K. Lifetime movie — it’s a bit better acted
than the norm (Travis Nelson in particular is very good at the James Dean
Smolder and I suspect he could have done a better job with the character if
he’d had the extra moral complexity typical of a Christine Conradt script, and
I also really liked Sophie Gendron as the slut Jenna) but without the flashes
of Gothic more inspired Lifetime directors than Alexander Carrière have brought
to similar plots. What I’m trying to fathom is why the major-domos at Lifetime
thought this, of all their
similar scripts, was worth spinning out into a three-part miniseries instead of
just leaving well enough alone with this as a one-off!
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Game of Thrones, season five, episodes 1 and 2: “The Wars to Come,” “The House of Black and White” (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I cracked open the Blu-Ray box of season five of Game of Thrones with its first two episodes, “The Wars to Come” and “The House of Black and White.” The online synopses read as follows:
Two nights ago Charles and I cracked open the Blu-Ray box of season five of Game of Thrones with its first two episodes, “The Wars to Come” and “The House of Black and White.” The online synopses read as follows:
“The Wars to Come”: Cersei
comes to the funeral of her father Tywin Lannister and blames her brother Jaime
for his death. Tyrion arrives at his destination transported in a wooden box
and Lord Varys discloses that Jaime had asked him to save his brother. White
Rat is murdered in a brothel and Daenerys asks Grey Worm to find the killer.
She visits her dragons in the dungeons but they do not respect her. Jon Snow is
training a teenager, but Melisandre brings him to talk to Stannis Baratheon. He
assigns Snow to convince Mance Rayder to bend his knees for him and make his
people fight with his army. Will Mance accept the deal?
“The House of Black and White”: Arya Stark sails to Braavos and arrives at the House of Black and White
to seek out Jaqen H'ghar; however she is not welcomed to enter in the house and
she throws her coin away into the sea. Brienne and Podrick are eating in a
tavern and see Sansa and Little Finger, but Sansa refuses to follow Brienne.
The men that are escorting Little Finger and Sansa unsuccessfully hunt Brienne
and Podrick down on the road. Cersei shows to Jaime that their daughter
Myrcella is in danger and Jaime seeks out Bronn and makes an offer for him to
travel with him to Dorn. In Meereen, the Son of Harpy is captured and Daenerys
has a meeting with her leaders to decide his fate. Barristan advises her to
give a fair trial to the man; however Mossador disobeys her order and kills the
Son of Harpy. Daenerys sentences him to death and there is a riot in Meereen.
Jon Snow is invited by Stannis Baratheon to serve him; in return, he would give
the North to Jon and he would be Jon Stark, Lord of Winterfell. But Jon ...
Charles and I hadn’t watched any of Game of Thrones in over a month, but as I’ve said before the series
— though mostly filmed before Donald Trump became U.S. President — is a perfect
illustration of the Trump Zeitgeist:
a bunch of 1-percenters in power who don’t give a damn about anyone below them
and are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain their power out of sheer
lust (both the political and
sexual kinds!) and greed. Writers George R. R. Martin (whose still unfinished
multi-book cycle A Song of Ice and Fire was the source for Game of Thrones), David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have created a world
in which any hint of belief in a
cause outside one’s own well-being is ruthlessly punished and the cynicism of
the characters is maddeningly consistent. It’s interesting to see Tyrion
Lannister — the most morally complex of the characters and the one most honest
that self-preservation is all
that’s motivating him —smuggled out of King’s Landing in a wooden box, which
couldn’t help (at least to me) recall the opening of the film The
Invisible Man’s Revenge (in which Jon Hall
similarly escaped from prison by literally hiding in a bale of cotton: when we
see a knife cut the container open from inside it’s a marvelous bit of shock) and the macabre
Velvet Underground song “The Gift” (in which a young man named Waldo Jeffers
decides to pack himself inside a box and mail himself to his girlfriend — only
as she attempts to open the package with a large knife she accidentally stabs
himself to death with it) and complain about the difficulties of eliminating
human waste in there.
But the most powerful scene in these shows occurs at the
end of “The Wars to Come” in which Mance Rayder, leader of the Wildings north
of the Wall separating Westeros from whatever the highland kingdom is called
(i.e., Hadrian’s Wall between England and Scotland), not only refuses to “take
a knee” in support of Stannis Baratheon but stoically accepts being burned at
the stake as the price of his refusal. I admired the guy so much that I was
hoping as he was being burned there’d be a huge rainstorm that would put out
the fire, save him and give the lords who were trying to enlist him an omen
that they’d better leave him alone … but no such luck. That’s what happens to anyone in Game of Thrones that shows the slightest bit of integrity: they get
killed in as nasty a way as the writers can think up. (Actually, I’ve read that
being burned at the stake was a relatively humane form of execution because you
would be killed by smoke inhalation before the fires actually started to
consume your body. But people who were considered really behind the moral curve, including Queer people, were
not burned at the stake but were
bound up and thrown directly on the fire so they’d really suffer — which is how the term “faggots,” which
originally meant logs of firewood, came to be applied to Gay men.) The “House
of Black and White” in the second episode is actually a large castle that’s so
called because it has two entrance doors, one of which is black and one white,
and it’s inhabited by a bald Black guy who at the end of the show takes off his
latex mask (the idea that people with only a medieval knowledge of technology
could invent the latex mask is almost as preposterous as the idea in both
versions of One Million [Years], B.C. that cave people could have invented the push-up bra) and reveals he’s
a white guy with long hair.
The character arc of Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia
Clarke) as she travels around the back kingdoms of “Westeros” (which is mostly
supposed to be the British Isles, though there is at least one community that
looks like ancient Egypt, complete with hieroglyphics, animal-headed gods and
pyramids; and another a city with canal-like streets obviously modeled on
Venice) supposedly “liberating” slaves (who end up right back under the thumbs
of their former masters as soon as Daenerys’ armies leave — just like Southern
African-Americans were shoved back into near-slavery after the end of
Reconstruction!) and getting into trouble when one of her “Unsullied”
(presumably eunuch) warriors is caught in a whorehouse (the characters have the
same question we do — what was he doing in a whorehouse) and his throat is slit — only when the assailant is
killed by another “Unsullied” Daenerys, who had been determined to give the
killer a fair trial, puts the killer’s killer to death and starts a riot from
which she has to be evacuated by her soldiers, who lift their shields over her
so she doesn’t get hit by the rocks the rioters are throwing at her. About her
only consolation prize is that one of her dragons, who in the previous episode
looked like she’d lost control over them, this time nibbles at her hand in a
gesture of affection and fealty. Game of Thrones is full of the generally accepted mythos of what the Middle Ages were actually like, but it’s
also full of understated but unmistakable parallels to the modern world,
notably Daenerys’ self-righteous concept of “justice” that gets her into
trouble her advisors try to warn her against — though it seemed odd that the
phrase “taking the knee” is used here as a symbol of subservience whereas in
modern America it’s become a symbol of defiance!
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
American Experience: “The Vote,” part 2 (PBS, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the second half of a PBS American Experience documentary on the women’s suffrage movement. I had missed the first half on Monday due to a late work shift, and I suspect that one would have been a lot more interesting since it would have focused on the decades-long history of the movement and how the women’s movement grew out of the abolitionist movement and the disgust women abolitionists felt about being treated like second-class members of of a movement proudly proclaiming that all men were created equal. This portion dealt almost exclusively with the last five years of the original suffrage movement, from 1915 to 1920, and the division within the suffrage movement of whether to continue to push for suffrage state-by-state or seek a national constitutional amendment. The most interesting part of the story was the beneficial conflict between Carrie Chapman Katt, president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (the awkward name having resulted from the fact that there’d been a National Association and an American Association until the two merged) and practitioner of electoral organizing and lobbying; and Alice Paul, who essentially was to Katt what Malcolm X was to Martin Luther King. The legend is that the one time King and Malcolm actually met, Makclm told him, “It’s because of people like me that they listen to people like you” (though Malcolm was so aware of the antagonism both he and King were arousing in white people that when he was writing his autobiography he correctly predicted both he and King would be assassinated!), and it was Paul who was behind the extended suffragist pickets outside the White House in 1916-1917 to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to come out for suffrage. Paul and her direct-action pickets went through a lot of the vicious treatment that’s been meted out by the U.S. government to nonviolent protesters ever since: they were arrested, given relatively long prison sentences (as the government became increasingly determined to “break” the suffragists the sentences went up from a few dais to 30 days, then 60 days, then 120 days, then six or seven months), rough treatment and hunger strikes the authorities responded to by force-feeding Paul and the other women. There were also anti-suffrage women (essentially the Phyllis Schlaflys of their day), though the main opposition to suffrage came from Southern Democrats who were concerned about anything that might extend the franchise for fear that if white women were allowed to vote, Black women would be allowed to as well; Northern machine politicians who wanted a nice, safe, predictable electorate and didn’t relish the idea of having to rejigger their machines to handle twice the previous numbers of voters, and — a huge source of opposition to suffrage and the principal financial supporters of the anti-suffrage campaign — the alcoholic-beverage industry.
Last night I watched the second half of a PBS American Experience documentary on the women’s suffrage movement. I had missed the first half on Monday due to a late work shift, and I suspect that one would have been a lot more interesting since it would have focused on the decades-long history of the movement and how the women’s movement grew out of the abolitionist movement and the disgust women abolitionists felt about being treated like second-class members of of a movement proudly proclaiming that all men were created equal. This portion dealt almost exclusively with the last five years of the original suffrage movement, from 1915 to 1920, and the division within the suffrage movement of whether to continue to push for suffrage state-by-state or seek a national constitutional amendment. The most interesting part of the story was the beneficial conflict between Carrie Chapman Katt, president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (the awkward name having resulted from the fact that there’d been a National Association and an American Association until the two merged) and practitioner of electoral organizing and lobbying; and Alice Paul, who essentially was to Katt what Malcolm X was to Martin Luther King. The legend is that the one time King and Malcolm actually met, Makclm told him, “It’s because of people like me that they listen to people like you” (though Malcolm was so aware of the antagonism both he and King were arousing in white people that when he was writing his autobiography he correctly predicted both he and King would be assassinated!), and it was Paul who was behind the extended suffragist pickets outside the White House in 1916-1917 to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to come out for suffrage. Paul and her direct-action pickets went through a lot of the vicious treatment that’s been meted out by the U.S. government to nonviolent protesters ever since: they were arrested, given relatively long prison sentences (as the government became increasingly determined to “break” the suffragists the sentences went up from a few dais to 30 days, then 60 days, then 120 days, then six or seven months), rough treatment and hunger strikes the authorities responded to by force-feeding Paul and the other women. There were also anti-suffrage women (essentially the Phyllis Schlaflys of their day), though the main opposition to suffrage came from Southern Democrats who were concerned about anything that might extend the franchise for fear that if white women were allowed to vote, Black women would be allowed to as well; Northern machine politicians who wanted a nice, safe, predictable electorate and didn’t relish the idea of having to rejigger their machines to handle twice the previous numbers of voters, and — a huge source of opposition to suffrage and the principal financial supporters of the anti-suffrage campaign — the alcoholic-beverage industry.
One of the things people don’t understand about
the suffragists is that many of them were ardent Prohibitionists — with an
idealism that overcame common sense on this point, the suffragists looked at
how many working-class men spent their paychecks at the local saloon, leaving
their wives wondering how they were going to feed the family the next week with
no money, and they thought Prohibition would end, or at least make a major dent
in, urban poverty. They also thought Prohibition would end domestic violence,
since they thought the only reason a man would beat the wife he presumably
loved was because the booze was making him do it. One of the promos for this
show contained a photo of an anti-suffrage demonstrator carrying a sign that
bluntly read, “Suffrage = Prohibition.” I’ve pointed out at some of the annual
suffrage picnics held to celebrate the ratification of the 19th
Amendment (featuring local activists dressed in late 19th century
costumes impersonating the great suffragist leaders) that it was historically
inauthentic for them to serve wine at these events, and instead they should be
serving lemonade, the beverage both suffragists and Prohibitionists thought
should take the place of alcohol as America’s ceremonial “toast” drink.
Ironically, the Prohibition amendment, the 18th, zipped through
Congress and got far more than the requisite two-thirds votes in both houses,
while the suffrage amendment barely squeaked through by two votes in the House
and one in the Senate. Then the necessary ratification in three-fourths of the
states took over a year and came down to, of all places, Tennessee, where it
looked like it was going to go down to defeat in the Tennessee state senate
until one suffrage opponent received a letter from his mother that said, essentially,
“Be a good little boy and vote to give women the franchise.” That led one other
senator who’d avoided casting a recorded vote to put in his “aye” at the last
minute — literally. This reminded me of the preposterous vote at the Diet of
Worms (the name sounds silly but “Diet” means a legislative assembly and
“Worms” was the name of the city in Germany where it took place) in which the
63 cardinals then in office in the Roman Catholic Church met in solemn conclave
and debated whether women were people. By a vote of 32 to 31, the church voted
that they were — so the fight over suffrage in the U.S. followed the pattern
from the Diet of Worms of women winning human rights by razor-thin margins.
The
explanatory material mentions that not all women got the vote in 1920 — the
states in the South that had long perfected constitutionally sneaky ways to
deny Black men the vote did the
same with Black women (remember the opening scene in the film Selma in which Oprah Winfrey, in a cameo role as a Black
woman trying to register to vote in the early 1960’s, is shown a giant jar of
jelly beans and told that she can only register if she can come up with the exact number of jelly beans in the jar) — and also that
only about one-third of the newly enfranchised women who were allowed to vote
in the 1920 Presidential election actually did so. What it doesn’t mention is that women’s participation in the
electorate lagged behind men’s for another 40 years or so — and in the 1940’s a
number of political scientists argued that women simply weren’t that interested
in politics and their rightful “sphere” was in the home, keeping house and
raising the children (much the same sexist nonsense that had been used all
along by suffrage opponents) — until the 1960’s, when voter turnout among U.S.
women finally caught up with turnout among men and the political scientists finally realized what had happened: the women who had grown
up before the 19th Amendment was passed and who weren’t accustomed
to being able to vote had died off and been replaced by younger age cohorts who
had grown up in a country where women had always (at least in their lifetimes) been able to vote. I
have long believed that one of the most stupid things we as a species have ever
done to ourselves has been to slight, ignore or repress the insights, talents
and skills of over one-half the human population simply because of some slight
differences in reproductive plumbing.
Monday, July 6, 2020
Driven to the Edge (MarVista Entertainment, Cut 4 Productions, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on the TV for last night’s Lifetime “premiere” — once again, Lifetime isn’t providing advance notice of who’s in this film (aside from the two leading actors) or who the behind-the-scenes personnel were, though I was able to scrawl some all too often illegible names on a slip of paper and also reference imdb.com for a previous production by the same writer-director, Chris Sivertson. The film was called Driven to the Edge — the title was a pun because the principal character was a psychopathic woman, Jaye (I think Amanda Grace Benitez played her, but so little information exists online on this film I can’t be sure), who drives for a fictitious ride-share company called “Roller.” (Charles joked that if “Roller” was a real-life company this film would have been bankrolled by the real-life Uber company to scare people away from “Roller” and thereby drive them out of business.) Jaye gets her kicks by locking the doors of people unlucky enough to get into her car — she has so-called “child locks” that prevent people from opening her car doors from inside unless she pushes a control button to unlock them — and jamming their cell phones so they can’t call the police or anyone else for help.
Then she takes them to deserted locations, tortures them psychologically and physically, and kills them, while her omnipresent security cameras (which record audio as well as video — Charles said no real security cameras record audio, but I daresay there are probably a few high-end ones that come with microphones to capture sounds as well as sights), including the one concealed inside her shades as well as the ones she’s got wired in her two homes (a mansion she grabbed from her estranged husband Myles and — stop me if you’ve heard this before — a deserted mountain cabin), so she can play back recordings of her murders and therefore get her rocks off all over again. (A surprising number of these sickos — including pedophiles — record their actions, and often the police recover the recordings and they become the primary evidence against them.) The opening scene shows a young (straight, though the guy looked so effeminate at first I thought they were Lesbians) couple making the mistake of necking in Jaye’s car, leading her to take them to her mansion and clobber both of them with a baseball bat (Jaye’s favorite — but not exclusive — means of murder, for reasons we don’t learn until the last few minutes, along with the rest of What Makes Jaye Run). At first I thought she was going to turn out to be a highly “moralistic” psycho driven to kill people who dare do sexually raunchy things in her car — which would quite frankly have made for a much better movie than the one we actually got.
Then we meet her principal victim, a young woman named Tess (Taylor Spreitler) whom Jaye attaches herself to and, though Sivertson’s script makes clear she’s not interested in making Tess her lover (even though they end up spending one night together in bed, non-sexually, in the mansion) but wants her as a sort of protégé. Tess is supposed to own her own fashion business (though the clothes costume designer Morgan DeGroff put her in are either impractical or downright ugly), though all we see of her at work is her crouching on the floor of her studio with large, curved pieces of paper that are supposed to represent a pattern) and Jaye tells people she sells real estate (which she doesn’t). The cast of characters is oddly claustrophobic: besides Tess and Jaye, the only other important people in the movie are Tess’s friends Isaac and Olive (the sort of O.K.-looking but nerdy people you expect to see as second leads in a Lifetime movie), who met when he picked her up in a ride-share car and started dating (at one point Isaac talks about inventing a combination ride-share and dating app); Tess’s out-of-town boyfriend Danny (not a bad-looking guy but not that drop-dead gorgeous, either); and Myles, who comes on the scene in mid-movie after Tess is leaving Jaye’s mansion following her weird sleepover and confronts her, and who later gets offed by Jaye when he threatens to give away her secret that she’s really a ride-share driver and not a real-estate broker. (Why Jaye seems so worried that people will find that out about her and not that she’s a serial killer is one of the many stupid plot holes in Sivertson’s script.)
As the movie progresses (like a disease), Jaye offs Isaac and Myles with her omnipresent baseball bat and stabs Danny repeatedly (in an unusually gory and explicit scene for a Lifetime movie) with a shiv she’s made from a toothbrush handle. She also kidnaps Olive and holds her hostage — though through much of the movie we’re led to believe that she’s killed her, too — and at the end Jaye tricks Tess into coming out to that deserted mountain cabin and tells her that Olive has pleaded with Jaye to kill Tess instead of her (sort of like Winston Smith betraying his girlfriend Julia in Room 101 at the end of George Orwell’s 1984) and Tess should therefore kill Olive instead while Jaye has her conveniently tied up and available to strangle (since Jaye is smart enough not to trust Tess with the baseball bat). In the end Tess and Olive subdue Jaye and flee, but not before we get [spoiler alert!] as much of Jaye’s origin story as Sivertson is going to give us. It seems that when Jaye was still a girl, her mother got her to kill her abusive father by, you guessed it, clubbing him to death with a baseball bat as he slept, on the idea that the cops (who literally never exist in this movie — we don’t see any law enforcement personnel or any hint that the successive disappearances of members of a small circle of friends attract any attention from the authorities at all; this reminded me of the preposterous Bela Lugosi Monogram vehicle The Invisible Ghost from 1941, in which for some reason Lugosi’s character is never suspected of a string of murders even though all the victims are his servants), and as if that weren’t preposterous enough, Jaye also tells Tess that she’s Jaye’s younger sister, separated from her and reared elsewhere (the only “plant” for that was an earlier passing reference to Tess having been adopted), though I’m still trying to figure out whether Sivertson meant that to be story reality or just one more of Jaye’s lies.
Sivertson does attempt to give Jaye’s character some points of interest, including hearing an incoherent babble of voices in her head (at least he didn’t do the Son of Sam number and have her hallucinate that her dog was telling her to kill people!) and having done an impressive amount of research on previous female serial killers. But in the end this is one more Lifetime movie that’s done in by its sheer improbability, and it’s yet another movie in which the director is also the writer and therefore has no one but himself to blame. Indeed, I wish Sivertson had had another director on the project — a second voice to tell him, “Don’t you think you’re really overdoing this?” Charles put it into the bad-movie-that-could-have been good, and it does have its points — among them some quite effective neo-Gothic cinematography by Chris Heinrich and an O.K. performance by Benitez or whoever is playing the psycho (she’s particularly effective at making the character convincingly butch in some scenes and feminine in others). But overall it’s yet another confirmation of Hitchcock’s Law: Alfred Hitchcock never made another whodunit after his early talkie Murder! (1930) and for the rest of his career he preferred stories in which he would let the audience know up front who was who and what was really going on, while the suspense would come from how and when the characters would find out, and what would happen to them when they did. Sivertson played part of the Hitchcock game in Driven to the Edge — at least he let us know Jaye was a psycho from the moment we saw her — but when Hitchcock did this sort of story in Psycho he took his time to let us know Norman Bates was a murderer but gave away his motive (like Jaye, Norman had been induced by his mom to kill his dad and that had permanently warped his brain) considerably earlier, to much better effect.
I turned on the TV for last night’s Lifetime “premiere” — once again, Lifetime isn’t providing advance notice of who’s in this film (aside from the two leading actors) or who the behind-the-scenes personnel were, though I was able to scrawl some all too often illegible names on a slip of paper and also reference imdb.com for a previous production by the same writer-director, Chris Sivertson. The film was called Driven to the Edge — the title was a pun because the principal character was a psychopathic woman, Jaye (I think Amanda Grace Benitez played her, but so little information exists online on this film I can’t be sure), who drives for a fictitious ride-share company called “Roller.” (Charles joked that if “Roller” was a real-life company this film would have been bankrolled by the real-life Uber company to scare people away from “Roller” and thereby drive them out of business.) Jaye gets her kicks by locking the doors of people unlucky enough to get into her car — she has so-called “child locks” that prevent people from opening her car doors from inside unless she pushes a control button to unlock them — and jamming their cell phones so they can’t call the police or anyone else for help.
Then she takes them to deserted locations, tortures them psychologically and physically, and kills them, while her omnipresent security cameras (which record audio as well as video — Charles said no real security cameras record audio, but I daresay there are probably a few high-end ones that come with microphones to capture sounds as well as sights), including the one concealed inside her shades as well as the ones she’s got wired in her two homes (a mansion she grabbed from her estranged husband Myles and — stop me if you’ve heard this before — a deserted mountain cabin), so she can play back recordings of her murders and therefore get her rocks off all over again. (A surprising number of these sickos — including pedophiles — record their actions, and often the police recover the recordings and they become the primary evidence against them.) The opening scene shows a young (straight, though the guy looked so effeminate at first I thought they were Lesbians) couple making the mistake of necking in Jaye’s car, leading her to take them to her mansion and clobber both of them with a baseball bat (Jaye’s favorite — but not exclusive — means of murder, for reasons we don’t learn until the last few minutes, along with the rest of What Makes Jaye Run). At first I thought she was going to turn out to be a highly “moralistic” psycho driven to kill people who dare do sexually raunchy things in her car — which would quite frankly have made for a much better movie than the one we actually got.
Then we meet her principal victim, a young woman named Tess (Taylor Spreitler) whom Jaye attaches herself to and, though Sivertson’s script makes clear she’s not interested in making Tess her lover (even though they end up spending one night together in bed, non-sexually, in the mansion) but wants her as a sort of protégé. Tess is supposed to own her own fashion business (though the clothes costume designer Morgan DeGroff put her in are either impractical or downright ugly), though all we see of her at work is her crouching on the floor of her studio with large, curved pieces of paper that are supposed to represent a pattern) and Jaye tells people she sells real estate (which she doesn’t). The cast of characters is oddly claustrophobic: besides Tess and Jaye, the only other important people in the movie are Tess’s friends Isaac and Olive (the sort of O.K.-looking but nerdy people you expect to see as second leads in a Lifetime movie), who met when he picked her up in a ride-share car and started dating (at one point Isaac talks about inventing a combination ride-share and dating app); Tess’s out-of-town boyfriend Danny (not a bad-looking guy but not that drop-dead gorgeous, either); and Myles, who comes on the scene in mid-movie after Tess is leaving Jaye’s mansion following her weird sleepover and confronts her, and who later gets offed by Jaye when he threatens to give away her secret that she’s really a ride-share driver and not a real-estate broker. (Why Jaye seems so worried that people will find that out about her and not that she’s a serial killer is one of the many stupid plot holes in Sivertson’s script.)
As the movie progresses (like a disease), Jaye offs Isaac and Myles with her omnipresent baseball bat and stabs Danny repeatedly (in an unusually gory and explicit scene for a Lifetime movie) with a shiv she’s made from a toothbrush handle. She also kidnaps Olive and holds her hostage — though through much of the movie we’re led to believe that she’s killed her, too — and at the end Jaye tricks Tess into coming out to that deserted mountain cabin and tells her that Olive has pleaded with Jaye to kill Tess instead of her (sort of like Winston Smith betraying his girlfriend Julia in Room 101 at the end of George Orwell’s 1984) and Tess should therefore kill Olive instead while Jaye has her conveniently tied up and available to strangle (since Jaye is smart enough not to trust Tess with the baseball bat). In the end Tess and Olive subdue Jaye and flee, but not before we get [spoiler alert!] as much of Jaye’s origin story as Sivertson is going to give us. It seems that when Jaye was still a girl, her mother got her to kill her abusive father by, you guessed it, clubbing him to death with a baseball bat as he slept, on the idea that the cops (who literally never exist in this movie — we don’t see any law enforcement personnel or any hint that the successive disappearances of members of a small circle of friends attract any attention from the authorities at all; this reminded me of the preposterous Bela Lugosi Monogram vehicle The Invisible Ghost from 1941, in which for some reason Lugosi’s character is never suspected of a string of murders even though all the victims are his servants), and as if that weren’t preposterous enough, Jaye also tells Tess that she’s Jaye’s younger sister, separated from her and reared elsewhere (the only “plant” for that was an earlier passing reference to Tess having been adopted), though I’m still trying to figure out whether Sivertson meant that to be story reality or just one more of Jaye’s lies.
Sivertson does attempt to give Jaye’s character some points of interest, including hearing an incoherent babble of voices in her head (at least he didn’t do the Son of Sam number and have her hallucinate that her dog was telling her to kill people!) and having done an impressive amount of research on previous female serial killers. But in the end this is one more Lifetime movie that’s done in by its sheer improbability, and it’s yet another movie in which the director is also the writer and therefore has no one but himself to blame. Indeed, I wish Sivertson had had another director on the project — a second voice to tell him, “Don’t you think you’re really overdoing this?” Charles put it into the bad-movie-that-could-have been good, and it does have its points — among them some quite effective neo-Gothic cinematography by Chris Heinrich and an O.K. performance by Benitez or whoever is playing the psycho (she’s particularly effective at making the character convincingly butch in some scenes and feminine in others). But overall it’s yet another confirmation of Hitchcock’s Law: Alfred Hitchcock never made another whodunit after his early talkie Murder! (1930) and for the rest of his career he preferred stories in which he would let the audience know up front who was who and what was really going on, while the suspense would come from how and when the characters would find out, and what would happen to them when they did. Sivertson played part of the Hitchcock game in Driven to the Edge — at least he let us know Jaye was a psycho from the moment we saw her — but when Hitchcock did this sort of story in Psycho he took his time to let us know Norman Bates was a murderer but gave away his motive (like Jaye, Norman had been induced by his mom to kill his dad and that had permanently warped his brain) considerably earlier, to much better effect.
Sunday, July 5, 2020
40th Anniversary “A Capitol Fourth” Concert (PBS-TV, WETA, aired July 4, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent the evening on the Fourth of July 2020 watching some interesting programming on KPBS: an early (1985) Ken Burns documentary called The Statue of Liberty (back when Burns still made films of reasonable length — this was just under an hour); a rerun of a local concert special from August 30, 2019 with the San Diego Symphony conducted by Christopher Dragon, focusing on the music of Tchaikovsky; and the centerpiece of the night, the 40th anniversary presentation of A Capitol Fourth. Needless to say, this show was absolutely nothing like any of the 39 previous entries in the series, thanks primarily to the dictatorship of SARS-CoV-2 under which we presently live, in which a sub-microscopic assembly of nucleic acid, proteins and a lipid coat whose only purpose in life is to make more copies of itself has put an end to large public gatherings of virtually all sorts (unless you are Donald Trump, continually calling the faithful to mass rallies and belittling the virus as “Kung Flu” — I don’t know what’s more obnoxious about that name, its racism or its sheer stupidity). The concerts are usually held on the west lawn of the Capitol Mall — and this one was, too, or at least most of it was (there were remote segments from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and, of all places, Nashville), but the performers were all filmed at different times, and there was no audience present.
In the two songs on which we saw the usual orchestra (the National Symphony of Washington, D.C.) and conductor (Jack Everly, who’s led these concerts since the death of their founder, Erich Kunzel, in 2009) backing singers in the here and now — Mandy Gonzalez on the opening “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Renée Fleming on the (sort-of) closing “God Bless America” — there were only about 10 to 15 musicians, sitting probably more than six feet apart from each other on a huge stage to maintain the now-obligatory “social distancing” (a phrase I especially hate and hope — but don’t expect — to see pass from the language once the SARS-CoV-2 emergency passes and we no longer need it) — though the show was padded out with orchestral performances from the good old days as reminders of what this event used to look like: Richard Rodgers’ “The Carousel Waltz” (well done, though no one —not even Rodgers himself — has ever conducted this music with the mad energy Alfred Newman gave it in the soundtrack to the 1956 Carousel film) from 2015; the last four minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture from 2017; and accompanying Ray Charles on “America, the Beautiful” from 2000. The concert opened with gospel singer Yolanda Adams singing “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” (she did it nicely but giving a singer this good a song this banal practically defines the term “overqualified”), and after Mandy Gonzalez sang the national anthem Andy Grammer, an O.K. country singer, beamed in from Los Angeles with a decent song called “I Will Fight for You.” Then there came the first of three elaborate montages dealing with singers in various musical genres that have appeared on previous shows, this one with soul singers like Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Kool & The Gang (that’s like presenting Beethoven, Mozart and some guy who writes commercial jingles, in that order), Gladys Knight, The Four Tops and Aretha Franklin — and Aretha still soars over the other talents in her field so much she can still stop a show even though she’s been dead for two years.
Then a living soul diva, Patti Labelle, beamed in from Philadelphia in a setting in which either the real Liberty Bell or a mockup of it (and if it’s the real one I had no idea it was so small!) was part of her backdrop to sing her 1980’s hit version of “Over the Rainbow.” Back then I thought she way over-ornamented it (Ray Charles’ 1963 recording from his album Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul remains my favorite non-Judy version), but over the years I’ve warmed to the superb musicianship of her treatment of this song — and the fact that she’s no longer wearing those preposterous wigs that made her look like an upturned lawnmower helps. Then we hears a group calling themselves The Temptations — five Black guys who look like they’re getting on in years but not old enough to have been in the original group (I believe all the originals are dead by now — Otis Williams was the last one to survive and he used to tour with a group of rump Temptations in which the other guys looked one-third to one-half of his age) — did a medley of “Get Ready,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and the inevitable “My Girl,” and they were still appealing even though whoever sang lead on “My Girl” didn’t have the melting sweetness of David Ruffin on the original record. The next performer was Brantley Gilbert, one of my favorite current country singers — I remember buying a CD of his after seeing him on a country-music awards show and noticing he was the only perfomer there using pedal steel guitar, this once-paradigmatic country instrument — and he sang a song called “If You Never Had Heartbreak” that I liked but would have liked better if I could have made out more of the words. One of the problems with making music in the Zoom age is that the sound balances are sometimes way off; Gilbert was done in by the sheer volume of his band, which kept drowning him out. Then came one of the most wrenching and powerful moments of the show: Brian Stokes Mitchell singing “The Impossible Dream” from the musical Man of La Mancha, backed only by a piano player, and turning it from a song whose sheer pretentiousness usually turns me off into a timeless ode to perseverance and pride. In the current pandemic I thought the line, “To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause,” seemed especially relevant.
After “The Impossible Dream” came another montage segment of clips from previous shows, this time of country stars: Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Dierks Bentley, Luke Combs, Reba McIntire and Johnny Cash (who, like Aretha in the soul segment, couldn’t help dominating even from beyond the grave). After that came the most intense, powerful and soulful performance of the night: a nice-looking young blonde country singer named Lauren Alaina came out and tore into Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” and sang a song that on previous Capitol Fourths had turned into a joke (one year it was even done by the Muppets!) and threw herself into it with such scorching intensity I found myself regretting even more than usual that she hadn’t done Woody’s more radical verses. (Dear Lauren Alaina: please record “This Land Is Your Land” and please perform all of it!) After that came a tribute to Afghanistan and Iraq war veteran José Ramos and then Broadway star Kelli O’Hara doing “If I Loved You” from Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Carousel — she sang it beautifully but it was hard for me to get into it with Alaina’s powerful “This Land Is Your Land” still ringing in my ears. Then they showed Jack Everly and the National Symphony Orchestra’s 2015 rendition of the show’s overture, “The Carousel Waltz,” and after that they went into a tribute to the front-line medical and hospital workers during the pandemic (including people who literally flew hundreds of miles to care for COVID-19 patients in New York City at the height of their pandemic) and then singer Chrissy Metz, star of NBC’s This Is Us and a large woman who’d actually be good casting, physically and vocally, for a biopic of Mama Cass Elliott: she did “I’m Standing Beside You,” yet another ode to the emotional connections between people even in the midst of this crisis that’s forcing us to stay physically apart. Once again, her song was good and well performed, but the sheer righteous soul (words I only rarely use to describe white singers!) of Lauren Alaina was still ringing in my ears.
Then there was a tribute to historically important African-Americans, and after that Vanessa Williams, in addition to her duties co-hosting the show with John Stamos, sang a medley of two songs written or co-written by Stephen Sondheim: “Not While I’m Around” from Sweeney Todd and “Somewhere” from West Side Story (music by Leonard Bernstein but lyrics by Sondheim). Though the lyrics of “Not While I’m Around” fit in with the overall theme of unity in the midst of adversity many of last night’s performers were going for in their song choices, I couldn’t help but wonder who thought a song from a musical about serial murder and cannibalism was appropriately inspirational for this occasion. Then came the third montage sequence, this time dealing with (real or alleged) rock performers: Neil Diamond (no!), Little Richard (wop-bop-a-loo-bop yeah!), The Beach Boys (definitely yes — indeed I remember their last A Capitol Fourth appearance, in which they got to sing six songs, a very long set for this concert, and they were in superb late form), Jimmy Buffett (I like him as a novelty act but he ain’t rock ’n’ roll!), Huey Lewis and the News (pop-rock), Gloria Estefan (great, but not rock!) and Kenny Loggins (borderline). Afterwards came a performance by a genuine rock legend, John Fogerty, lead singer and principal songwriter of Creedence Clearwater Revival, playing in a band with three of his kids — his daughter has long straight blonde hair and looks like she beamed in from a whole other family, but his two sons look amazingly like he did at their age and one of them was playing the iconic Hofner violin bass Paul McCartney played with the Beatles. They did “Centerfield” (with John Fogerty playing an odd-shaped guitar that looks like it was made from a baseball bat) and “Proud Mary” (I’ve loved this song ever since I first heard the Creedence version, from their landmark second album Bayou Country, but I guess I’ve got spoiled from hearing Tina Turner’s version so often that even though he wrote it, Fogerty’s just doesn’t pack the same punch).
The show started to peter out after Fogerty’s songs, with the snippet of the 1812 Overture taken from the 2017 concert (though the chyrons assured us that the fireworks display we were getting was live … at least on the East Coast, since just over the words “Live Fireworks” we saw “Pre-Recorded” in a different font, yet one more reminder that to the Atlantic-centric media mavens on the East Coast, we on the West Coast still suck hind tit and always will) and the U.S. Army Band and Herald Trumpets shown doing a patriotic medley — George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” George Gershwin’s “Strike Up the Band” — an ironic song choice since it was written for a 1927 musical that was basically the Wag the Dog of its day, a sharp satire on militarism and war fever —and Cohan’s “You’re a Grand Old Flag” — from 2017. The only new footage was Renée Fleming singing “God Bless America” with a few members of the National Symphony sitting properly socially distant from each other. Then after the patriotic medley we did get two new songs, country star Trace Adkins doing “God Save the Queen” — oops, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” — and Yolanda Adams, backed by four disappointed high-school students who had been picked to sing at their graduation ceremony before our viral dictator stopped them from having one, did another nice but banal song, “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” (Then again, she’s not the first great gospel singer who’s had to plow her way through this one: Mahalia Jackson recorded it on her very last album in 1971.) After that came a clip that was totally unfollowable, then or now: Ray Charles belting out his soulful, unsurpassable version of “America, the Beautiful” from 2000, before John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” (probably also a clip from the past) served as the outro music for the closing credits. This edition of A Capitol Fourth was probably as good as it could have been given the circumstances our viral dictator have forced upon us, with incredible performances by Patti Labelle, Brian Stokes Mitchell and especially Lauren Alaima (where has her voice been all my life?) standing out.
I spent the evening on the Fourth of July 2020 watching some interesting programming on KPBS: an early (1985) Ken Burns documentary called The Statue of Liberty (back when Burns still made films of reasonable length — this was just under an hour); a rerun of a local concert special from August 30, 2019 with the San Diego Symphony conducted by Christopher Dragon, focusing on the music of Tchaikovsky; and the centerpiece of the night, the 40th anniversary presentation of A Capitol Fourth. Needless to say, this show was absolutely nothing like any of the 39 previous entries in the series, thanks primarily to the dictatorship of SARS-CoV-2 under which we presently live, in which a sub-microscopic assembly of nucleic acid, proteins and a lipid coat whose only purpose in life is to make more copies of itself has put an end to large public gatherings of virtually all sorts (unless you are Donald Trump, continually calling the faithful to mass rallies and belittling the virus as “Kung Flu” — I don’t know what’s more obnoxious about that name, its racism or its sheer stupidity). The concerts are usually held on the west lawn of the Capitol Mall — and this one was, too, or at least most of it was (there were remote segments from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and, of all places, Nashville), but the performers were all filmed at different times, and there was no audience present.
In the two songs on which we saw the usual orchestra (the National Symphony of Washington, D.C.) and conductor (Jack Everly, who’s led these concerts since the death of their founder, Erich Kunzel, in 2009) backing singers in the here and now — Mandy Gonzalez on the opening “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Renée Fleming on the (sort-of) closing “God Bless America” — there were only about 10 to 15 musicians, sitting probably more than six feet apart from each other on a huge stage to maintain the now-obligatory “social distancing” (a phrase I especially hate and hope — but don’t expect — to see pass from the language once the SARS-CoV-2 emergency passes and we no longer need it) — though the show was padded out with orchestral performances from the good old days as reminders of what this event used to look like: Richard Rodgers’ “The Carousel Waltz” (well done, though no one —not even Rodgers himself — has ever conducted this music with the mad energy Alfred Newman gave it in the soundtrack to the 1956 Carousel film) from 2015; the last four minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture from 2017; and accompanying Ray Charles on “America, the Beautiful” from 2000. The concert opened with gospel singer Yolanda Adams singing “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” (she did it nicely but giving a singer this good a song this banal practically defines the term “overqualified”), and after Mandy Gonzalez sang the national anthem Andy Grammer, an O.K. country singer, beamed in from Los Angeles with a decent song called “I Will Fight for You.” Then there came the first of three elaborate montages dealing with singers in various musical genres that have appeared on previous shows, this one with soul singers like Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Kool & The Gang (that’s like presenting Beethoven, Mozart and some guy who writes commercial jingles, in that order), Gladys Knight, The Four Tops and Aretha Franklin — and Aretha still soars over the other talents in her field so much she can still stop a show even though she’s been dead for two years.
Then a living soul diva, Patti Labelle, beamed in from Philadelphia in a setting in which either the real Liberty Bell or a mockup of it (and if it’s the real one I had no idea it was so small!) was part of her backdrop to sing her 1980’s hit version of “Over the Rainbow.” Back then I thought she way over-ornamented it (Ray Charles’ 1963 recording from his album Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul remains my favorite non-Judy version), but over the years I’ve warmed to the superb musicianship of her treatment of this song — and the fact that she’s no longer wearing those preposterous wigs that made her look like an upturned lawnmower helps. Then we hears a group calling themselves The Temptations — five Black guys who look like they’re getting on in years but not old enough to have been in the original group (I believe all the originals are dead by now — Otis Williams was the last one to survive and he used to tour with a group of rump Temptations in which the other guys looked one-third to one-half of his age) — did a medley of “Get Ready,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and the inevitable “My Girl,” and they were still appealing even though whoever sang lead on “My Girl” didn’t have the melting sweetness of David Ruffin on the original record. The next performer was Brantley Gilbert, one of my favorite current country singers — I remember buying a CD of his after seeing him on a country-music awards show and noticing he was the only perfomer there using pedal steel guitar, this once-paradigmatic country instrument — and he sang a song called “If You Never Had Heartbreak” that I liked but would have liked better if I could have made out more of the words. One of the problems with making music in the Zoom age is that the sound balances are sometimes way off; Gilbert was done in by the sheer volume of his band, which kept drowning him out. Then came one of the most wrenching and powerful moments of the show: Brian Stokes Mitchell singing “The Impossible Dream” from the musical Man of La Mancha, backed only by a piano player, and turning it from a song whose sheer pretentiousness usually turns me off into a timeless ode to perseverance and pride. In the current pandemic I thought the line, “To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause,” seemed especially relevant.
After “The Impossible Dream” came another montage segment of clips from previous shows, this time of country stars: Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Dierks Bentley, Luke Combs, Reba McIntire and Johnny Cash (who, like Aretha in the soul segment, couldn’t help dominating even from beyond the grave). After that came the most intense, powerful and soulful performance of the night: a nice-looking young blonde country singer named Lauren Alaina came out and tore into Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” and sang a song that on previous Capitol Fourths had turned into a joke (one year it was even done by the Muppets!) and threw herself into it with such scorching intensity I found myself regretting even more than usual that she hadn’t done Woody’s more radical verses. (Dear Lauren Alaina: please record “This Land Is Your Land” and please perform all of it!) After that came a tribute to Afghanistan and Iraq war veteran José Ramos and then Broadway star Kelli O’Hara doing “If I Loved You” from Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Carousel — she sang it beautifully but it was hard for me to get into it with Alaina’s powerful “This Land Is Your Land” still ringing in my ears. Then they showed Jack Everly and the National Symphony Orchestra’s 2015 rendition of the show’s overture, “The Carousel Waltz,” and after that they went into a tribute to the front-line medical and hospital workers during the pandemic (including people who literally flew hundreds of miles to care for COVID-19 patients in New York City at the height of their pandemic) and then singer Chrissy Metz, star of NBC’s This Is Us and a large woman who’d actually be good casting, physically and vocally, for a biopic of Mama Cass Elliott: she did “I’m Standing Beside You,” yet another ode to the emotional connections between people even in the midst of this crisis that’s forcing us to stay physically apart. Once again, her song was good and well performed, but the sheer righteous soul (words I only rarely use to describe white singers!) of Lauren Alaina was still ringing in my ears.
Then there was a tribute to historically important African-Americans, and after that Vanessa Williams, in addition to her duties co-hosting the show with John Stamos, sang a medley of two songs written or co-written by Stephen Sondheim: “Not While I’m Around” from Sweeney Todd and “Somewhere” from West Side Story (music by Leonard Bernstein but lyrics by Sondheim). Though the lyrics of “Not While I’m Around” fit in with the overall theme of unity in the midst of adversity many of last night’s performers were going for in their song choices, I couldn’t help but wonder who thought a song from a musical about serial murder and cannibalism was appropriately inspirational for this occasion. Then came the third montage sequence, this time dealing with (real or alleged) rock performers: Neil Diamond (no!), Little Richard (wop-bop-a-loo-bop yeah!), The Beach Boys (definitely yes — indeed I remember their last A Capitol Fourth appearance, in which they got to sing six songs, a very long set for this concert, and they were in superb late form), Jimmy Buffett (I like him as a novelty act but he ain’t rock ’n’ roll!), Huey Lewis and the News (pop-rock), Gloria Estefan (great, but not rock!) and Kenny Loggins (borderline). Afterwards came a performance by a genuine rock legend, John Fogerty, lead singer and principal songwriter of Creedence Clearwater Revival, playing in a band with three of his kids — his daughter has long straight blonde hair and looks like she beamed in from a whole other family, but his two sons look amazingly like he did at their age and one of them was playing the iconic Hofner violin bass Paul McCartney played with the Beatles. They did “Centerfield” (with John Fogerty playing an odd-shaped guitar that looks like it was made from a baseball bat) and “Proud Mary” (I’ve loved this song ever since I first heard the Creedence version, from their landmark second album Bayou Country, but I guess I’ve got spoiled from hearing Tina Turner’s version so often that even though he wrote it, Fogerty’s just doesn’t pack the same punch).
The show started to peter out after Fogerty’s songs, with the snippet of the 1812 Overture taken from the 2017 concert (though the chyrons assured us that the fireworks display we were getting was live … at least on the East Coast, since just over the words “Live Fireworks” we saw “Pre-Recorded” in a different font, yet one more reminder that to the Atlantic-centric media mavens on the East Coast, we on the West Coast still suck hind tit and always will) and the U.S. Army Band and Herald Trumpets shown doing a patriotic medley — George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” George Gershwin’s “Strike Up the Band” — an ironic song choice since it was written for a 1927 musical that was basically the Wag the Dog of its day, a sharp satire on militarism and war fever —and Cohan’s “You’re a Grand Old Flag” — from 2017. The only new footage was Renée Fleming singing “God Bless America” with a few members of the National Symphony sitting properly socially distant from each other. Then after the patriotic medley we did get two new songs, country star Trace Adkins doing “God Save the Queen” — oops, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” — and Yolanda Adams, backed by four disappointed high-school students who had been picked to sing at their graduation ceremony before our viral dictator stopped them from having one, did another nice but banal song, “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” (Then again, she’s not the first great gospel singer who’s had to plow her way through this one: Mahalia Jackson recorded it on her very last album in 1971.) After that came a clip that was totally unfollowable, then or now: Ray Charles belting out his soulful, unsurpassable version of “America, the Beautiful” from 2000, before John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” (probably also a clip from the past) served as the outro music for the closing credits. This edition of A Capitol Fourth was probably as good as it could have been given the circumstances our viral dictator have forced upon us, with incredible performances by Patti Labelle, Brian Stokes Mitchell and especially Lauren Alaima (where has her voice been all my life?) standing out.
1812 Tchaikovsky Spectacular (San Diego Symphony, KPBS, August 30, 2019, rebroadcast July 4, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
While most PBS stations (including ours in previous years)
followed up the Capitol Fourth telecast
with a repeat showing of the same program, this year KPBS chose instead to
rerun a local show originally taped August 30, 2019 — and, let’s face it,
rebroadcasts of concerts during the SARS-CoV-2 crisis actually make more sense
than rerunning sporting events, since with a concert at least you know how it’s going to turn out and there’s no big
suspense about the outcome. The show actually began with the San Diego
Symphony’s current conductor, Rafael Payare, leading members of its brass section
in a piece that was instantly familiar: the old traditional Shaker hymn “The
Gift to Be Simple.” (Unfortunately for the Shakers, their idea of “simplicity”
included a total ban on their members having sex — and, not surprisingly, their
numbers dwindled over time.) The Symphony brass played this in an arrangement
by J. Villanueva, but most American classical-music fans identify this with
Aaron Copland because he used the song twice: as one of the 10 “Old American
Songs” he arranged for voice and piano and a principal theme of his ballet Appalachian
Spring. (The ballet is supposed to depict a
Shaker wedding ceremony, but if your sect doesn’t allow you to have sex, what
do you do on the wedding night?) The August 30, 2019 concert was devoted
entirely to the music of Tchaikovsky, both familiar and not so familiar. It was
conducted by Australian-born Christopher Dragon (I wondered if he was related
to 1940’s arranger-conductor Carmen Dragon and his considerably better-known
son, Daryl Dragon —who was “the Captain”in The Captain and Tenille, but he
isn’t), who’s now the principal conductor of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra
and came off during this concert as a screaming queen. (Well, that’s not
entirely inappropriate since Tchaikovsky was Gay.) The first piece they played
was the rather aggressive and sometimes ugly “Marche Slave” — Tchaikovsky was not a Russian nationalist, politically or musically, and
when he tried to pose as one the results were generally not good. His main
quarrel with the other leading Russian composers of his day, the so-called
“Mighty Five,” was they wanted to root their music in Russian folk songs,
traditions and legends and Tchaikovsky thought Russian musicians ought to look
to the West for their models.
The next work on the program was one I was
unfamiliar with, though I’d heard its main theme before: “Souvenir d’un lieu
cher,” Opus 42 (and his use of a French title was itself a spit-in-the-face to
the Russian musical nationalists!). According to the Arkivmusic.com Web site, “This
charming violin work owes its generation to the unique relationship between
Tchaikovsky and his wealthy patroness, Nadezha von Meck. Effectively freeing
the composer from any financial burden in life, this patronage carried with it
the unusual ‘rider’ that the two parties were never to meet.” (One of the
financial burdens Ms. von Meck freed Tchaikovsky from was all the hustlers who
were blackmailing him.) Tchaikovsky wrote this work, whose French title means
“Memory of a Dear Place” (the said place being von Meck’s villa in Brailovo,
Ukraine, where Tchaikovsky was allowed to stay when von Meck wasn’t living
there herself), around the time he was also working on his violin concerto, and
apparently its first movement, “Méditation,” was originally intended as the slow
movement of the violin concerto but was later replaced with the “Canzonetta”
that’s there now. Also, Tchaikovsky only completed a version for violin and
piano, and it was Alexander Glazunov who orchestrated it — but it’s still nice
to know that, even though the movement structure is slow-fast-slow instead of
the fast-slow-fast, we have what amounts to a second Tchaikovsky violin
concerto and I wish more soloists and orchestras would pair the two together on
CD instead of coupling the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with
violin-and-orchestra works by other composers. The violin soloist was a young
woman from the Utah Symphony named Ashlee Oliverson, and she was utterly
glorious, fitting the mostly soft, elegiac mood of the music but being able to
turn on the virtuosic juice when the score required it.
Then conductor Dragon
and the orchestra played the last movement from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 —
apparently as a promotion for the complete Symphonies Nos. 4 and 6 the
orchestra was supposed to play in their 2019-2020 season before SARS-CoV-2
pulled the plug on most concerts as well as big live events in general.
Dragon’s interpretation was energetic and quite enjoyable, but I still think
the best recording of this symphony is Leonard Bernstein’s 1970’s recording wth
the New York Philharmonic, which I just re-acquired in a boxed set of
Bernstein’s Tchaikovsky recordings with that orchestra (which includes all of
Tchaikovsky’s six numbered symphonies — and if you want a great recording of
the Tchaikovsky symphonies at a reasonable price, look no further). The second
half of the concert featured eight numbers from the Swan Lake ballet — I’m not sure what the provenance of the
version Dragon programmed is but Tchaikovsky arranged a suite of six numbers
from the score just before he died and gave it a separate opus number, 20a (the
full ballet is 20). Neither Tchaikovsky’s own suite nor whatever it was Dragon
programmed seem to make any attempt to follow the order of numbers in the
complete ballet, much less tell a potted version of the ballet’s story, though
of course Dragon opened with the so-called “Scène” that begins Act II (when the
plot leaves the superficial high-life of the court of Prince Siegfried and
enters the supernatural world of the titular swan lake, the evil sorcerer
Rothbart who turns human women into swans, and Odette, his principal victim and
the ballet’s star; though the principal ballerina in Swan Lake is obliged to dance a dual role, the good swan-woman
Odette and the bad swan-woman Odile, who tries to seduce Siegfried from Odette)
which was used over the opening credits of the early-1930’s classic horror
films from Universal, Dracula and
The Mummy.
The concert’s finale,
of course, was the 1812 Overture
— actually heard complete, not just the flashy last four minutes we get at the Capitol
Fourth concerts. The 1812
Overture was composed by Tchaikovsky in
1880 for a celebration of the 70th anniversary of Russia’s defeat of
Napoleon’s invading armies in 1812 — so one of the pieces trotted out at Fourth
of July celebrations is about the successful defense by an autocracy against a
foreign invader who brought at least some elements of democracy and
enlightenment in its wake. (One historian commented that many of the countries
Napoleon occupied kept some of his reforms in place even after his fall —
whereas the countries the Nazis had occupied in World War II couldn’t wait to
get rid of every vestige of Nazi rule. I think the case he was making was that
Napoleon was a twisted idealist who actually did the countries he invaded some good, while Hitler was just a thug who plundered
them and killed the people he considered “racially inferior.”) Christopher
Dragon introduced the 1812 Overture
by quoting Tchaikovsky as saying the piece was “loud and noisy,” which it is
(though there is a hauntingly
lyrical theme in the middle of it), though I suspect what Tchaikovsky was
really saying was something like, “Yeah, it’s loud and noisy. I wrote it for a
big outdoor celebration where they expected loud and noisy, so I gave it to them — but I really
don’t like the piece and I’d just as soon never hear it played again.”
(Actually, Tchaikovsky conducted it himself at least twice after the premiere —
including at his famous concert opening Carnegie Hall in 1886 — so either he
liked it after all or he grudgingly yielded to the work’s popularity the way
Arthur Conan Doyle yielded to the popularity of Sherlock Holmes and brought him
back to life after killing him off in “The Final Problem.”)
The original
outdoor performance of the 1812 Overture featured not only a symphony orchestra but an onstage brass band, a
carillon and a battery of cannons — and after 1956, when Antál Doráti and the
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra recorded the 1812 Overture in a highly “produced” recording that added the U.S.
Field Artillery and the bells of the Harkness Carillon Tower for the climax,
the 1812 Overture has become a
“sonic spectacular” both on records and live. And if the cannon and bells
weren’t loud and noisy enough, Leopold Stokowski started the process of
bringing in a chorus to sing the words of the national anthem of Tsarist Russia
when Tchaikovsky quotes it in the score. Christopher Dragon’s performance was
relatively low-keyed in the extra-noise department — a few cannon and a
tubular-bells player — but it did
accompany a fireworks display (so my husband Charles got to see televised
fireworks after all after having got home from work too late to see the ones on
A Capitol Fourth) and made a nice
conclusion to a SARS-CoV-2-conditioned low-keyed Fourth of July!
Saturday, July 4, 2020
Windjammer: The Voyage of the “Christian Radich” (National General/Cinemiracle, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was the 1958 semi-documentary Windjammer, or as its full title reads, Windjammer: The Voyage of the Christian Radich. (The last word in the subtitle is pronounced “Radik,” by the way.) She was designed in the mid-1930’s by Yngvar Kjelstrup, who also served as her first captain from her maiden voyage in 1937 to her final cruise along the western coast of Europe, to the West Indies, then up the east coast of the United States before re-crossing the Atlantic to come home. That last cruise is the one depicted in this film. When I first ordered this film I did some research, assuming that a “windjammer” was a particular kind of sailing ship; it turns out the name was used for any sail-powered vessel in the 19th century, and it was often an insult hurled by sailors on steamships at their more technologically retro brethren who were still “sailors” in the most literal sense. Windjammer was the first — and, as it turned out, the only — film ever made in Cinemiracle, and I first heard of both the film and the format in an unlikely source: John Culshaw’s Putting the Record Straight, his posthumously published autobiography about his years as a classical record producer for British Decca. He called the process “a rather poor attempt to duplicate the effect of Cinerama without violating Cinerama’s technical patents,” and dismissed Windjammer as “a hack documentary.”
The main difference between Cinerama and Cinemiracle was that, while both used three cameras simultaneously filming the same image, the right and left cameras bounced their images off mirrors before they were recorded on film. The reason for that was to smooth out the often obvious “join lines” where one camera’s image ended and the next one’s began, which had bedeviled Cinerama’s inventor, Fred Waller, and his technical people since they originally developed the format. Like Cinerama, Cinemiracle projected its films onto a curved screen — though I have been unable to find out online if they used the vertical Venetian-blind style panels on the Cinemiracle screen that were used in Cinerama. (The Cinerama screen was made of 150 silver-painted strips — you could actually walk through their screen — which was designed partly so that you could see the image equally well no matter where you were in the theatre, and partly in an attempt to smooth out those join lines between the images from the three cameras.) Flicker Alley, the company through which this film was reissued on Blu-Ray and DVD (which was something of a surprise since they usually only do reissues of silent films, hence their name), issued it not in letterboxed format but in something called “Smilebox,” which attempted to reproduce the effect of the original Cinemiracle showings on a big curved screen. Fortunately we have a large enough TV that, even though it could hardly reproduce the theatrical effect, at least could come within hailing distance (a nautical metaphor!) of doing it justice. Windjammer premiered at the fabled Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and was such a success it ran there for 36 weeks, but ultimately Cinerama filed a patent lawsuit against Cinemiracle and National General Theatres, which had backed and bought the process, and won. As a result of the verdict, Cinerama took over the rights to Windjammer and reissued it as a Cinerama production in 1962.
Windjammer was a production of Louis de Rochemont, an interesting figure in movie history who emerged with a vengeance in 1935 as the producer of a weekly newsreel called The March of Time, backed by Henry R. Luce, publisher of Time magazine. It was supposed to be a sort of Time magazine on film, and each episode was introduced with a stentorian narrator (Westbook van Voorhis) intoning, “The MARCH … of TIME!” Intellectuals liked to disparage it for its slovenly editing and heavily editorial commentary that told you exactly what de Rochemont and his crew wanted you to think about what they were covering — they preferred the more abstract and more artistically filmed documentaries from Britain — but The March of Time became enormously popular. It was satirized in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as “News on the March,” the fictional newsreel that gives us the basics of Charles Foster Kane’s life and serves as a sort of table of contents that both sets the mood and helps us keep straight the sequence of events, told in flashback by people who knew Kane, that forms the bulk of the film. In 1944 de Rochemont cut a deal with 20th Century-Fox to start making feature-length dramatic films. Most of them were either espionage or suspense thrillers, and they made at least the pretense of being based more or less (usually less) on actual stories — first about Axis agents trying to steal American military secrets, and then when the war’s end pretty much killed the market for those sorts of stories and de Rochemont moved his production schedule to a more conventional sort of thriller like Call Northside 777, a quite good 1948 film noir starring James Stewart as a reporter who’s contacted by the mother of a death row inmate who’s convinced (rightly) her son is innocent and wants Stewart to solve the crime. In the 1950’s he worked with the Cinerama company on one of their early showcase films, Cinerama Holiday, and produced The Miracle of Todd A-O for Mike Todd’s company to promote its own rival wide-screen process, before signing with Cinemiracle and National General to produce Windjammer. He fired the original director of Windjammer, Bill Colleran, midway through the shoot and hired his son, Louis de Rochemont III, to take over. Windjammer depicts the 1957-58 voyage of the Christian Radich as a so-called “school ship,” training Norwegian teenage boys (we’re told in the commentary, delivered by Erik Bye in understandable but noticeably Norwegian-accented English), for careers in the country’s merchant marine.
While they’re out and about in the ocean they meet similar sail-powered training ships run by Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries (“Every place but Bolivia seems to haveone!” my husband Charles joked — in case you didn’t get it, part of the joke is that Bolivia is landlocked), and on their way they stop at various islands, including Madeira, Curaçao, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico, before stopping at New York and Philadelphia and doing a training run with a squadron of U.S. Navy ships, mostly destroyers but including at least one submarine. The guys from the Christian Radich get to board the Navy sub (in a rickety metal chair sliding on a plumb line of cable stretched from one ship to the other, something like the rickety metal seat with which Jean Peters was rescued from Niagara Falls in the 1953 film Niagara), and when one of the U.S. Navy’s harmless practice torpedoes (we know it’s harmless because the front of it is painted yellow to distinguish it from ones which actually contain explosives) falls to the ocean floor, a deep-sea diver from the Christian Radich wearing a SCUBA tank (still a novelty item in 1958) is sent to retrieve it. Windjammer is a film alternately exhilarating and annoying, at its best when the narration and Morton Gould’s music shut up and let us enjoy the stunning visuals. It begins with a 12-minute credits and prologue sequence in which we see on a normal non-wide screen the process by which the Christian Radich’s sailors are recruited (we’re told that hundreds of young men apply but they’re winnowed down to 50, and that most of them are 17 but two of the crew members are as young as 14), the crew is organized and the Radich sails down the coast of Norway (we get some predictable shots of Norway’s fabled fjords) — and then when the ship hits the open sea the curtains (animated effects added for this reissue) open up and we see the full width of the Cinemiracle image (with the join lines less noticeable than in Cinerama but still all too visible in some scenes). Charles noted that this is what I like to call a portmanteau movie, containing something likely to appeal to everyone in the audience; every port of call the Christian Radich visits is an excuse for some FitzPatrick-esque travelogues of some exciting vistas, and there are also oddball guest celebrities.
One of the quirkier aspects of the ship is that one crew member, Sven Lübeck, is alsn an aspiring classical pianist, and his mom gave him permission to sail with the Radich only on condition that a piano be loaded and carried on board so he could continue to practice. At one point Lübeck is shown writing a letter to Arthur Fiedler, founding conductor of the Boston “Pops” Orchestra, hoping to be featured as soloist with them — and, lo and behold, eventually we see Fiedler himself, along with his orchestra set up on a pier, with Lübeck as soloist running through (what else?) the opening movement of the piano concerto by Norway’s most famous composer, Edvard Grieg. There are also other celebrities involved: when the ship reaches Puerto Rico we see famed cellist Pablo Casals (who had fled Spain after Franco’s side won the nation’s civil war in the late 1930’s and settled in Puerto Rico because there he could live under U.S. jurisdiction, be in a Spanish-speaking environment and, since Puerto Rico is a U.S. “commonwealth” instead of a state, not have to pay U.S. taxes on his worldwide concert earnings) giving an al fresco open-air concert in which he plays the “Song of the Birds,” a piece he composed based on an old folk lullaby from his native Catalonia. (It was also recorded by Joan Baez on her late-1960’s Christmas-themed album Noël as “Carol of the Birds.”) And when we get to New York, just after we see three of the young Norwegian sailors get off the vessel and we think it’s going to turn into On the Town, Windjammer takes a sudden turn into abstraction; we see alternating streetscapes (with a surprising number of Nash cars as part of New York’s traffic) and kaleidoscope patterns, and instead of forming one continuous image the de Rochemonts show discernibly different views on each panel and make it obvious that we’re actually watching three separate movies at once. During the New York scenes we also get a Dixieland band led by trumpeter Wilbur De Paris playing a medley of “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — the trombonist in the opening looked like Kid Ory (though later a younger trombone player seems to take over) and the clarinetist was almost certainly Barney Bigard.
We also get quite a few songs in the movie, ostensibly traditional fare sung by the Norwegian crew boys but really by a vocal group called The Easy Riders (Americans who affected slight Norwegian accents for the project) led by Terry Gilkyson, American songwriter who composed them (Gilkyson’s most famous credit is for writing Dean Martin’s hit “Memories Are Made of This,” and his daughter Eliza is a modern-day contry-folk singer-songwriter), and of course when we’re in Trinidad we also get two different singers singing calypso songs, one in the street and one on board the Radich when they’re invited there for a party with the boys. Windjammer is also a good movie for beefcake fans: first we get a scene of the boys in their bunkroom slipped down to their undershorts as we’re shown how they get into the hammocks in which they sleep (a quite different view of hammocks than the one we got in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, probably the most famous film containing them); then we get a scene of them in a pool on one of their Caribbean stops in swimsuits and nothing else, and then we get another scene of them going about in shorts. One of the boys reminded me of the young Elvis Presley — his facial features were similar enough (remember that Elvis was of Norwegian immigrant ancestry — the name “Elvis” is a corruption of the Norwegian “Al wyss,” meaning “all wise”) that I had the feeling he looked like Elvis would have if he’d kept his natural blond hair instead of dyeing it black all those years — and though Gilkyson’s songs kept telling us that the big thing the sailors wanted to do when they got off the ship and had shore leave was to hook up with women, that’s not what the images tell us. I suspect the de Rochemonts were so afraid of running afoul of the Production Code people that the few scenes we see of the sailors going out with women are so decorous the film comes off as considerably more homoerotic than its makers intended!
Windjammer has its flaws, and most of them can be traced to Louis de Rochemont — in 1938 he had produced a March of Time segment called Inside Nazi Germany, only instead of filming inside the real Nazi Germany he staged most of it in the U.S. with refugee German actors playing Nazis, and while we can readily understand why he wouldn’t send cast and crew into Nazi Germany and risk having them arrested (or worse), The March of Time was notorious for such pseudo-documentary fakery. There’s plenty of it in Windjammer, too, including actual scripted dialogue for the sailors — James L. Shute is credited with writing the film — which they appear to be delivering themselves, since one of the locales on board is the boys’ clubhouse, in which they’re supposed to speak only English and anyone who slips up and speaks Norwegian has to put some coins in a coffee jar as a fine. (Charles told me that the Norwegian denomination in which the fines were paid was so small that by the time he went to Norway in the late 1970’s it was no longer in circulation, sort of like what happened to the British farthing or what’s happening to the U.S. penny.) Part of the problem is Morton Gould’s musical score, which features way too much “Mickey-Mousing” (a movie term meaning the very close synchronization of picture and sound — the term comes from Walt Disney’s decision when he was making his first sound cartoons that audiences would “buy” the idea of a sound cartoon only if picture and sound were very tightly locked together) and, like the narration, insists on telling us what we’re seeing instead of letting us just ease back and see it. I could have wished for a more atmospheric, less literal musical background for this film — something more like Debussy’s La Mer — and I’m sure Gould could have provided one, but that wasn’t what the de Rochemonts wanted.
Windjammer is a fun movie overall, with scenes of spectacular beauty alternating with the sort of cheesy Hollywood silliness one suspects the de Rochemonts knew the folks at National General wanted to show off their process and attract crowds; according to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, director David Lean said that the scene of the U.S. sub going underwater next to the Radich was the most beautiful shot he’d ever seen in any film. (It’s an interesting comment given that Lean’s first film as director, In Which We Serve from 1942, featured the crew of a British vessel reliving their past lives as they try to stay alive following the sinking of their ship in the English Channel.) I loved the effect we got just after that, in which we got to see a sub’s-eye view of its descent in which we first saw a waterline, then watched it disappear as we went under water — and just how they got underwater shots with the ridiculously complicated Cinemiracle camera (since they did the three-screen effect by lashing together three standard Mitchell 35mm film cameras instead of building their own camera the way Cinerama did, their equipment was a lot larger, bulkier and more cumbersome) is beyond me. I’m not sure what to make of Windjammer as a whole — I enjoyed it but I could see a lot of areas in which it could have been even better — and this post is as long as it is at least partly because I’m still trying to come to grips with this spectacle that shows us great chunks of the world but tries to make it look as much like the U.S. as possible: throughout the film you get the impression that its creators are constantly tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “Hey! They’re not that different from us, after all!” — 7/4/20
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Last night’s “feature” was the 1958 semi-documentary Windjammer, or as its full title reads, Windjammer: The Voyage of the Christian Radich. (The last word in the subtitle is pronounced “Radik,” by the way.) She was designed in the mid-1930’s by Yngvar Kjelstrup, who also served as her first captain from her maiden voyage in 1937 to her final cruise along the western coast of Europe, to the West Indies, then up the east coast of the United States before re-crossing the Atlantic to come home. That last cruise is the one depicted in this film. When I first ordered this film I did some research, assuming that a “windjammer” was a particular kind of sailing ship; it turns out the name was used for any sail-powered vessel in the 19th century, and it was often an insult hurled by sailors on steamships at their more technologically retro brethren who were still “sailors” in the most literal sense. Windjammer was the first — and, as it turned out, the only — film ever made in Cinemiracle, and I first heard of both the film and the format in an unlikely source: John Culshaw’s Putting the Record Straight, his posthumously published autobiography about his years as a classical record producer for British Decca. He called the process “a rather poor attempt to duplicate the effect of Cinerama without violating Cinerama’s technical patents,” and dismissed Windjammer as “a hack documentary.”
The main difference between Cinerama and Cinemiracle was that, while both used three cameras simultaneously filming the same image, the right and left cameras bounced their images off mirrors before they were recorded on film. The reason for that was to smooth out the often obvious “join lines” where one camera’s image ended and the next one’s began, which had bedeviled Cinerama’s inventor, Fred Waller, and his technical people since they originally developed the format. Like Cinerama, Cinemiracle projected its films onto a curved screen — though I have been unable to find out online if they used the vertical Venetian-blind style panels on the Cinemiracle screen that were used in Cinerama. (The Cinerama screen was made of 150 silver-painted strips — you could actually walk through their screen — which was designed partly so that you could see the image equally well no matter where you were in the theatre, and partly in an attempt to smooth out those join lines between the images from the three cameras.) Flicker Alley, the company through which this film was reissued on Blu-Ray and DVD (which was something of a surprise since they usually only do reissues of silent films, hence their name), issued it not in letterboxed format but in something called “Smilebox,” which attempted to reproduce the effect of the original Cinemiracle showings on a big curved screen. Fortunately we have a large enough TV that, even though it could hardly reproduce the theatrical effect, at least could come within hailing distance (a nautical metaphor!) of doing it justice. Windjammer premiered at the fabled Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and was such a success it ran there for 36 weeks, but ultimately Cinerama filed a patent lawsuit against Cinemiracle and National General Theatres, which had backed and bought the process, and won. As a result of the verdict, Cinerama took over the rights to Windjammer and reissued it as a Cinerama production in 1962.
Windjammer was a production of Louis de Rochemont, an interesting figure in movie history who emerged with a vengeance in 1935 as the producer of a weekly newsreel called The March of Time, backed by Henry R. Luce, publisher of Time magazine. It was supposed to be a sort of Time magazine on film, and each episode was introduced with a stentorian narrator (Westbook van Voorhis) intoning, “The MARCH … of TIME!” Intellectuals liked to disparage it for its slovenly editing and heavily editorial commentary that told you exactly what de Rochemont and his crew wanted you to think about what they were covering — they preferred the more abstract and more artistically filmed documentaries from Britain — but The March of Time became enormously popular. It was satirized in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as “News on the March,” the fictional newsreel that gives us the basics of Charles Foster Kane’s life and serves as a sort of table of contents that both sets the mood and helps us keep straight the sequence of events, told in flashback by people who knew Kane, that forms the bulk of the film. In 1944 de Rochemont cut a deal with 20th Century-Fox to start making feature-length dramatic films. Most of them were either espionage or suspense thrillers, and they made at least the pretense of being based more or less (usually less) on actual stories — first about Axis agents trying to steal American military secrets, and then when the war’s end pretty much killed the market for those sorts of stories and de Rochemont moved his production schedule to a more conventional sort of thriller like Call Northside 777, a quite good 1948 film noir starring James Stewart as a reporter who’s contacted by the mother of a death row inmate who’s convinced (rightly) her son is innocent and wants Stewart to solve the crime. In the 1950’s he worked with the Cinerama company on one of their early showcase films, Cinerama Holiday, and produced The Miracle of Todd A-O for Mike Todd’s company to promote its own rival wide-screen process, before signing with Cinemiracle and National General to produce Windjammer. He fired the original director of Windjammer, Bill Colleran, midway through the shoot and hired his son, Louis de Rochemont III, to take over. Windjammer depicts the 1957-58 voyage of the Christian Radich as a so-called “school ship,” training Norwegian teenage boys (we’re told in the commentary, delivered by Erik Bye in understandable but noticeably Norwegian-accented English), for careers in the country’s merchant marine.
While they’re out and about in the ocean they meet similar sail-powered training ships run by Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries (“Every place but Bolivia seems to haveone!” my husband Charles joked — in case you didn’t get it, part of the joke is that Bolivia is landlocked), and on their way they stop at various islands, including Madeira, Curaçao, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico, before stopping at New York and Philadelphia and doing a training run with a squadron of U.S. Navy ships, mostly destroyers but including at least one submarine. The guys from the Christian Radich get to board the Navy sub (in a rickety metal chair sliding on a plumb line of cable stretched from one ship to the other, something like the rickety metal seat with which Jean Peters was rescued from Niagara Falls in the 1953 film Niagara), and when one of the U.S. Navy’s harmless practice torpedoes (we know it’s harmless because the front of it is painted yellow to distinguish it from ones which actually contain explosives) falls to the ocean floor, a deep-sea diver from the Christian Radich wearing a SCUBA tank (still a novelty item in 1958) is sent to retrieve it. Windjammer is a film alternately exhilarating and annoying, at its best when the narration and Morton Gould’s music shut up and let us enjoy the stunning visuals. It begins with a 12-minute credits and prologue sequence in which we see on a normal non-wide screen the process by which the Christian Radich’s sailors are recruited (we’re told that hundreds of young men apply but they’re winnowed down to 50, and that most of them are 17 but two of the crew members are as young as 14), the crew is organized and the Radich sails down the coast of Norway (we get some predictable shots of Norway’s fabled fjords) — and then when the ship hits the open sea the curtains (animated effects added for this reissue) open up and we see the full width of the Cinemiracle image (with the join lines less noticeable than in Cinerama but still all too visible in some scenes). Charles noted that this is what I like to call a portmanteau movie, containing something likely to appeal to everyone in the audience; every port of call the Christian Radich visits is an excuse for some FitzPatrick-esque travelogues of some exciting vistas, and there are also oddball guest celebrities.
One of the quirkier aspects of the ship is that one crew member, Sven Lübeck, is alsn an aspiring classical pianist, and his mom gave him permission to sail with the Radich only on condition that a piano be loaded and carried on board so he could continue to practice. At one point Lübeck is shown writing a letter to Arthur Fiedler, founding conductor of the Boston “Pops” Orchestra, hoping to be featured as soloist with them — and, lo and behold, eventually we see Fiedler himself, along with his orchestra set up on a pier, with Lübeck as soloist running through (what else?) the opening movement of the piano concerto by Norway’s most famous composer, Edvard Grieg. There are also other celebrities involved: when the ship reaches Puerto Rico we see famed cellist Pablo Casals (who had fled Spain after Franco’s side won the nation’s civil war in the late 1930’s and settled in Puerto Rico because there he could live under U.S. jurisdiction, be in a Spanish-speaking environment and, since Puerto Rico is a U.S. “commonwealth” instead of a state, not have to pay U.S. taxes on his worldwide concert earnings) giving an al fresco open-air concert in which he plays the “Song of the Birds,” a piece he composed based on an old folk lullaby from his native Catalonia. (It was also recorded by Joan Baez on her late-1960’s Christmas-themed album Noël as “Carol of the Birds.”) And when we get to New York, just after we see three of the young Norwegian sailors get off the vessel and we think it’s going to turn into On the Town, Windjammer takes a sudden turn into abstraction; we see alternating streetscapes (with a surprising number of Nash cars as part of New York’s traffic) and kaleidoscope patterns, and instead of forming one continuous image the de Rochemonts show discernibly different views on each panel and make it obvious that we’re actually watching three separate movies at once. During the New York scenes we also get a Dixieland band led by trumpeter Wilbur De Paris playing a medley of “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — the trombonist in the opening looked like Kid Ory (though later a younger trombone player seems to take over) and the clarinetist was almost certainly Barney Bigard.
We also get quite a few songs in the movie, ostensibly traditional fare sung by the Norwegian crew boys but really by a vocal group called The Easy Riders (Americans who affected slight Norwegian accents for the project) led by Terry Gilkyson, American songwriter who composed them (Gilkyson’s most famous credit is for writing Dean Martin’s hit “Memories Are Made of This,” and his daughter Eliza is a modern-day contry-folk singer-songwriter), and of course when we’re in Trinidad we also get two different singers singing calypso songs, one in the street and one on board the Radich when they’re invited there for a party with the boys. Windjammer is also a good movie for beefcake fans: first we get a scene of the boys in their bunkroom slipped down to their undershorts as we’re shown how they get into the hammocks in which they sleep (a quite different view of hammocks than the one we got in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, probably the most famous film containing them); then we get a scene of them in a pool on one of their Caribbean stops in swimsuits and nothing else, and then we get another scene of them going about in shorts. One of the boys reminded me of the young Elvis Presley — his facial features were similar enough (remember that Elvis was of Norwegian immigrant ancestry — the name “Elvis” is a corruption of the Norwegian “Al wyss,” meaning “all wise”) that I had the feeling he looked like Elvis would have if he’d kept his natural blond hair instead of dyeing it black all those years — and though Gilkyson’s songs kept telling us that the big thing the sailors wanted to do when they got off the ship and had shore leave was to hook up with women, that’s not what the images tell us. I suspect the de Rochemonts were so afraid of running afoul of the Production Code people that the few scenes we see of the sailors going out with women are so decorous the film comes off as considerably more homoerotic than its makers intended!
Windjammer has its flaws, and most of them can be traced to Louis de Rochemont — in 1938 he had produced a March of Time segment called Inside Nazi Germany, only instead of filming inside the real Nazi Germany he staged most of it in the U.S. with refugee German actors playing Nazis, and while we can readily understand why he wouldn’t send cast and crew into Nazi Germany and risk having them arrested (or worse), The March of Time was notorious for such pseudo-documentary fakery. There’s plenty of it in Windjammer, too, including actual scripted dialogue for the sailors — James L. Shute is credited with writing the film — which they appear to be delivering themselves, since one of the locales on board is the boys’ clubhouse, in which they’re supposed to speak only English and anyone who slips up and speaks Norwegian has to put some coins in a coffee jar as a fine. (Charles told me that the Norwegian denomination in which the fines were paid was so small that by the time he went to Norway in the late 1970’s it was no longer in circulation, sort of like what happened to the British farthing or what’s happening to the U.S. penny.) Part of the problem is Morton Gould’s musical score, which features way too much “Mickey-Mousing” (a movie term meaning the very close synchronization of picture and sound — the term comes from Walt Disney’s decision when he was making his first sound cartoons that audiences would “buy” the idea of a sound cartoon only if picture and sound were very tightly locked together) and, like the narration, insists on telling us what we’re seeing instead of letting us just ease back and see it. I could have wished for a more atmospheric, less literal musical background for this film — something more like Debussy’s La Mer — and I’m sure Gould could have provided one, but that wasn’t what the de Rochemonts wanted.
Windjammer is a fun movie overall, with scenes of spectacular beauty alternating with the sort of cheesy Hollywood silliness one suspects the de Rochemonts knew the folks at National General wanted to show off their process and attract crowds; according to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, director David Lean said that the scene of the U.S. sub going underwater next to the Radich was the most beautiful shot he’d ever seen in any film. (It’s an interesting comment given that Lean’s first film as director, In Which We Serve from 1942, featured the crew of a British vessel reliving their past lives as they try to stay alive following the sinking of their ship in the English Channel.) I loved the effect we got just after that, in which we got to see a sub’s-eye view of its descent in which we first saw a waterline, then watched it disappear as we went under water — and just how they got underwater shots with the ridiculously complicated Cinemiracle camera (since they did the three-screen effect by lashing together three standard Mitchell 35mm film cameras instead of building their own camera the way Cinerama did, their equipment was a lot larger, bulkier and more cumbersome) is beyond me. I’m not sure what to make of Windjammer as a whole — I enjoyed it but I could see a lot of areas in which it could have been even better — and this post is as long as it is at least partly because I’m still trying to come to grips with this spectacle that shows us great chunks of the world but tries to make it look as much like the U.S. as possible: throughout the film you get the impression that its creators are constantly tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “Hey! They’re not that different from us, after all!” — 7/4/20
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I spent most of yesterday afternoon writing a long blog post
about the movie Windjammer (in which I
failed to mention two of the most curious credits of people involved in it:
Arthur “Weegee” Fellig was listed as the photographer of the almost abstract
New York cityscapes in the film — during those scenes I joked, “Windjammerqatsi” — and while the imdb.com page on the film lists only
two cinematographers, Joseph C. Brun and Gayne Rescher, the actual credits list
a third: Gordon Willis, who would become a major “name” in the 1970’s, shooting
such instant classics as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (for which he pioneered the dank brown-and-green
look that worked in The Godfather
as a sort of continuous visual metaphor for the criminal underworld in which
the characters lived, but has since been done to death and become the default
look for virtually everything)
and Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
There’s also a story only tangentially touched on in the film Windjammer about a German sailing ship called Pamir, whom the sailors of the Christian Radich encounter while on their cruise — we don’t see the Pamir or any of its crew members, but they radio fraternal
greetings to each other as they pass each other in the West Indies. At the end
of Windjammer, just as the hot
blond Norwegian 17-year-olds are leaving the vessel and carrying on with the
rest of their lives (whatever those are going to be), the Radich crew members get news that the Pamir has sunk in a storm (Hurricane Carrie) off the coast
of the Azores Islands and only six of its 86 crew members have been rescued.
The Wikipedia page on Pamir
begins with this paragraph indicating how and why it sank:
Pamir, a four-masted barque,
was one of the famous Flying
P-Liner sailing ships of the German shipping company F. Laeisz. She was the
last commercial sailing ship to round Cape Horn,
in 1949. By 1957, she had been outmoded by modern bulk carriers and
could not operate at a profit. Her shipping consortium’s inability to finance
much-needed repairs or to recruit sufficient sail-trained officers caused
severe technical difficulties. On 21 September 1957, she was caught in Hurricane Carrie and
sank off the Azores,
with only six survivors rescued after an extensive search.
The rest of the page about the Pamir is even more curious: the ship was built in 1905 at
a shipyard in Hamburg, the fifth of 10 in her production line, and when World
War I started she was stranded in the Canary Islands and did not return to
Germany until 1920. Then she was seized by the Italian government as war
reparations (remember that Italy and Germany were on opposite sides in World War I even though they were on the
same side in World War II), but her original German owners, the F. Lasker
company, bought her back in 1924 to move nitrate fertilizer — the same thing
she’d been doing before the war. In 1931 they sold her to a Finnish company
which used her to import wheat from Australia to Europe, and in 1941 it was
seized while in port at Wellington, New Zealand. The New Zealanders used her
mostly as a cargo vessel but also made 10 passenger trips with her, five to San
Francisco, three to Vancouver, and two between Wellington and Sydney (which
makes more sense than sending her across the Pacific Ocean during World War
II). She was going to be scrapped when a German who’d formerly been a Pamir crew member in the 1920’s bought her, remodeled her,
added an auxiliary diesel engine (which leaked oil and lost its propeller on
the Pamir’s maiden voyage with
it, apparently much to the delight of the sail-favoring crew); alas, she could
no longer compete economically with the big diesel-fired steam freighters, her
decks deteriorated and she sailed on what turned out to be her last voyage with
an inexperienced captain and a crew of sailors more accurately described as
interns than trainees who didn’t know how to keep a ship upright in a severe
storm. The sinking was considered a national tragedy in Germany and made
headlines around the world — though in the rather antiseptic view of sea life
we get in Windjammer (as one
imdb.com reviewer wrote, “What made this film a hit was the fact you could not
take it seriously. No military discipline was portrayed in this film. Every
cadet, man and boy, was having a good time even when they were doing their
chores”) the Pamir disaster comes
off as just a blip of pathos leavening a light-hearted portrayal of sea life
that totally ignores the myriad dangers faced by a ship — especially one
powered by the chancy medium of wind — on an nine-month cruise on the high
seas. — 7/5/20
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