Cheerleader Abduction (Lifetime Pictures, Robbins Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime ran a movie that was sort of an outlier in their “Fear the Cheer” series because, while it was called Cheerleader Abduction, the fact that the teenage heroine was a cheerleader was pretty incidental to the plot and we didn’t get to see many glimpses of scantily clad teenage girls doing hot dance routines (the main attraction of cheerleader movies on Lifetime -- as I’ve pointed out before, the words “cheerleader” and “sorority” are buzzwords Lifetime uses in their periodic attempts to get straight men to watch their channel). From the previews I had expected Cheerleader Abduction to be a sort of modern-dress version of The Great Lie (the 1941 Warner Bros. tearjerker in which Bette Davis and Mary Astor are romantic rivals for George Brent: Astor gets Brent to marry her but he almost immediately has the marriage annulled so he can marry Davis -- only in the meantime Astor got pregnant with Brent’s child and so she and Davis, who naturally can’t stand each other, have to live together in a desert hideaway for several months until the baby is born so they can pass it off as Davis’s; unlike other women who worked with Bette Davis, Mary Astor had nothing but good to say about the experience, claiming that Davis had asked the director to do retakes to favor Astor and get a stronger performance out of her, with the result that Astor won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award), but instead it turned out to be the old chestnut about the teenage girl who gets pregnant (by a boy she tricked with at a party and otherwise can’t stand -- yes, once again we have what David O. Selznick famously ridiculed as “infallible pregnancies at a single contact”) and gets recruited by a sinister “pregnancy counselor” who’s really running an underground adoption agency trafficking in black-market babies.

Alas, this is one Lifetime movie (produced by Lifetime Pictures in association with Robbins Entertainment and MarVista Entertainment) that has somehow escaped the notice of imdb.com, and the online source I was able to find gives only two actors’ names associated with their characters: Jerni Stewart as the heroine (sort of), Olivia Patton, and Kristen Harris as her mom Trish Patton. The family also includes a husband, Douglas -- who’s sort of a milquetoast character who works from home as a designer while Trish is mayor of the small town of Danforth, Michigan where the story takes place and she’s running in a Democratic primary for governor. (Judging from the experience of the current Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who’s been savagely attacked by President Trump over her aggressive response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and was the subject of an alleged plot by 13 white supremacists to kidnap her, give her a rump “trial” and possibly kill her, I wanted to take Trish aside and warn her that being a Democratic woman governor of Michigan isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.) There’s also one other kid in the Patton family, Olivia’s younger brother Aiden.

The gimmick is that almost as soon as Olivia finds out she’s pregnant and the guy who made her that way, Blake, rudely puts her off and basically says, “Not my problem,” she runs into the villain of the piece, Pamela Fairlane. I wish I knew the name of the actress playing this part because she’s the best performer in the movie; she’s middle-aged, rather dumpy-looking and butch enough with her short haircut that the friend with whom I was watching this thought she was supposed to be playing a Lesbian. (Actually it seems these days as if a lot of women are adopting the androgynous look, cutting their hair short and wearing bras that mash their tits down instead of showing them off -- and with so many people wearing face masks during the pandemic and thereby concealing whether or not they have facial hair, it’s getting harder to tell men and women apart when you see them on the street. The Black cheerleader coach in this movie is tall, slender, has her hair cut very short and has so little in the breast department that at first I wondered if she was a guy.) Whoever the actress playing Pamela is, she turns in a remarkable performance, managing to suggest the character’s ability to pose as sweetness and light as well as the evil underneath.

That’s a good thing because, while Kristen Harris turns in a performance of power and authority as the concerned mother torn between advancing her political career and protecting her daughter, Jerni Stewart is a total drip. She’s unable to bring any reality to the character’s conflicts and she goes through the whole movie with a fixed expression of mild annoyance at all the issues Jessica Landry’s script throws at her, from getting morning sickness while riding with the family in their car to attempting to register horror when she realizes that Pamela has essentially kidnapped her to grab and sell her baby. Michelle Ouillet is the director, and she turns in a decent job given the limitations of both the script and her leading actress -- the suspense as Pamela takes Olivia to a seedy motel to have her kjd (with the assistance of a barely competent doctor who walks out in the middle of the procedure, saying that Pamela isn’t paying him enough to risk losing his medical license over this) and Trish blows off an all-important TV candidates’ debate to give chase and rescue her daughter is genuinely exciting and convincing -- but for the most part Cheerleader Abduction is a pretty standard Lifetime movie with little to recommend it aside from a nice performance from the villain and good work from Kristen Harris.

I found the ending pretty preposterous: it takes place seven months after the main action and tells us that, despite blowing off the big TV primary debate to rescue her daughter, Trish won not only the primary but the general election for governor (so she can get nasty tweets from President Trump and death threats from white supremacists!) despite blowing off the debate -- it would have worked better dramatically if Trish had dropped out of the governor’s race because she realized she had got so wrapped up in her political career she neglected her family and put her daughter in mortal danger -- and Olivia is once again working a game as a cheerleader as Trish walks in as part of the audience, pushing a baby stroller obviously containing her grandchild (whose sex we never learn, by the way, though Olivia had at least two ultrasounds taken during her pregnancy). But then that’s a piece with a story one of whose plot gimmicks is that Pamela told Olivia not to tell anybody, especially her parents, that she was knocked up -- the only person Olivia confides in is Ashley, a Black girl who’s her best friend on the cheerleading squad (ya remember the cheerleading squad?) -- making this, like so many other movies (including a lot of the Astaire-Rogers musicals, in which the lies led to mistaken-identity gimmicks that were at least genuinely funny), one in which the plot complications would evaporate almost instantly as soon as any one character told any of the other characters the truth.

Cheer Camp Killer (Lifetime Films, Hybrid, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “new” Lifetime movie was yet another one in what’s becoming an awfully tired series of films about unscrupulous cheerleaders, which they’re showing under the collective rubric “Fear the Cheer.” (Last year they did a similar series -- with some of the same movies -- as “Cheer, Rally, Kill!”) This one was called Cheer Camp Killer and was produced by Hybrid along with Lifetime -- who named themselves a producing company as well as an outlet channel on the credits -- and it was directed by Randy Carter from a script by Anna White that followed all the predictable formulae of a Lifetime movie, particularly in this weird “Killer Cheerleader” sub-genre. There’s the Good Cheerleader and the Bad Cheerleader, and this time they’re competing to win the championship in the showcase gig at the end of the cheer summer camp at “Pacific University of Southern California” (which, as my husband Charles pointed out, is a mash-up of two real college names, University of the Pacific and University of Southern California).

The Good Cheerleader is Sophie Jacobs (Mariah Robinson), a lithesome medium-height African-American who was an enthusiastic cheerleader until a year before, when her mom suddenly died of a brain aneurysm (which, we learn later, Sophie blames herself for because when Sophie was four her mom injured herself in the head rescuing her from a tree house, and Sophie is convinced the concussion her mom got doing that led directly to her death over a decade later). Now she’s a reluctant participant in cheer camp and she’s only talked into going by her dad because he points out that the prize is a full-ride scholarship to the college of her choice (who knew colleges offered scholarships in cheer?) and that’s the only way she can afford higher education. The Bad Cheerleader is Victoria Richards (Sydney Malakeh), who goes into the cheer camp with one huge advantage already -- her mom, Beth Richards (Andrea Bogart), is one of the three coaches.

Andrea Bogart and Sophie Malakeh look different enough it’s hard to suspend disbelief and accept them as mother and daughter -- Malakeh is olive-skinned and has long raven-black hair, while Bogart is clearly white and blonde -- but there’s an odd antagonism between them that’s the most interesting aspect of White’s script: Victoria is determined to do whatever she has to do to win the competition, and when she has her moments of guilt and doubt her mom is there to pressure her into whatever dastardly schemes are necessary to ensure her success. In the film’s first scene Victoria and a male co-conspirator act to eliminate one potential winner, Lilly Walker (Monica Rose Betz), by spiking her water bottle with a drug “cocktail” containing both a date-rape drug and a steroid. She’s driving her friend Charlotte Brown (Jacqueline Scislowski) home from a cheer practice when she succumbs to the effects of the drug, loses consciousness, crashes their car into a tree, and when the police find her wrecked car and rescue her she tests positive for a performance-enhancing drug and is expelled from the upcoming cheer camp. Charlotte is convinced Lilly was framed and hopes to find out who did it and why when she arrives at the cheer camp and ends up as Sophie’s roommate.

The cheerleaders are divided into the Blue Team and the Red Team,though we are told that the contest winner always comes fron the Red Team. Sophie and Charlotte end up on the Blue Team along with one of the two male cheerleaders at the camp, Jack (Philip McElroy), who’s been a friend of Sophie’s since they were in second grade together but now that they’ve passed puberty wants to be more than a friend -- though she doesn’t see him “that way” until the very end of the movie. There’s another guy at the cheer camp, Andrew (Christian Seavey), who ends up on the Red Team and we get to see very little of him after that. But the hottest guy in the movie is neither Jack (we’re supposed to think he’s irresistible but he’s so white-bread he would be conceivable casting for a biopic of Pat Boone or Mike Pence) nor Andrew but Greg (Andrew Rogers), the camp’s medical director. Given how much of the usual iconography of Lifetime holds that the sexiest man in the movie is also a black-hearted villain, it’s no surprise that Greg turns out to be Victoria’s co-conspirator: it was he who was the guy lurking around in the prologue sequence who spiked Lilly’s water (after using his pharmacological knowledge to concoct the drug “cocktail” in the first place). He’s also having a hot and heavy sexual affair with Victoria, who seems to have enlisted him in her plot by offering him her hot bod, though that doesn’t stop Victoria from offering herself to Jack as well by agreeing to “coach” him privately until he figures out what she’s doing and why.

Midway through the movie Victoria hosts a secret party at one of the dorm rooms at which the underage characters drink alcohol out of the obligatory red plastic Dixie cups (Dixie makes these in other colors but red seems to be the one out of which teenagers drink in Lifetime movies -- though Charles works as a grocery clerk and he tells me red plastic Dixie cups are the ones of choice for similar partiers in real life). Two of the coaches -- a heavy-set Black woman referred to only as “Coach Cooper” and who’s the overall boss of the camp (Kelli Dawn Hancock) and Beth Richards’ red-headed and considerably less crazy colleague, Mary Parker (Jennifer Marshall) -- get wind of this and come to break up the party, but in a scene straight out of a 1920’s or 1930’s movie about Prohibition Jack stumbles onto them, warns the guests and gets everybody to hide the booze. Only one of the partiers, Kara Meyer (Ariel Yasmine), has been partying more heartily than the others and she gets a disciplinary warning.

Later on Victoria tries to get Sophie expelled by befriending her and offering to take her to “a club where they never check I.D.’s,” where she gets Sophie drunk. The two return to cheer camp well after curfew and get caught by a campus security guard (who’s unidentified on imdb.com but he’s enough of a hottie that if we’d seen more of him he might have given Andrew Rogers a run for his money as the sexiest guy in this film), only they weasel out of it by giving the guard false names. Victoria says she’s Kara Walker and Sophie says she’s her roommate Charlotte -- and this gets Kara thrown out of the camp and Victoria off the hook, especially since her mom is on the disciplinary committee and she’s able to talk the other members out of actually calling the security guard to identify the people he detained and see if they were really who they told him they were.

Victoria also alienates Sophie from her Blue Team friends by secretly recording them talking about her and then editing the sound file to make it seem like they were insulting her. Charlotte tries to get her revenge by secretly filming Victoria and Greg having sex and then sending the file to the coaches -- but Victoria, showing a truly Trumpian skill at avoiding being held accountable for her misdeeds, claims that the footage is of Greg raping her, so she gets to stay in camp while he’s fired in disgrace. Before Greg gets fired Victoria uses him in one of her other plots -- she tells Sophie that for their showcase routine she will have to be lifted and be on top of the human pyramid, which Sophie can’t do because she’s been petrified of heights ever since her mom fell and hurt her head rescuing Sophie from a tree house (you remember -- like a 1930’s screenwriter, Anna White knows how to “plant”), and she loses her balance, falls and injures her ankle. Greg tells her she shouldn’t participate for the rest of the camp, but she announces, “I’m going to get a second opinion,” and she must have done so because the next time we see her she’s back on the Blue Team with her friends and seemingly none the worse for wear.

So Victoria decides the only way she can win is to kidnap Sophie, take her to a deserted place, suspend her from a tree in a classic bondage pose and keep her there overnight until the showcase is over. Only, in a bush move that would qualify Victoria for America’s Stupidest Criminals, she neglects either to take or to destroy Sophie’s cell phone, so Sophie’s friends Charlotte and Jack are able to locate and rescue her just in time for the competition, which of course Sophie wins while Victoria is arrested by a police officer (Jackie Meriau, who’s normally a makeup artist and has no other acting credits besides this one) we’ve never heard of who’s figured out Victoria’s whole plot and busted her (though there wasn’t any indication that Victoria’s mom Beth got held to account for her role in the skulduggery). The final scene shows Sophie grateful for winning the contest and melting her heart enough to let Jack give her a surprisingly diffident kiss.

Cheer Camp Killer is about midway on the quality level for the genre -- and Lifetime’s insistence on showing cheerleader movie after cheerleader movie is getting more than a bit wearing (especially seeing so many films cut to a virtually identical cliche pattern makes each new one seem less distinguishable from all the others). Randy Carter’s direction is acceptable and professional, but there’s only one scene -- Sophie’s and Victoria’s drunken walk back to campus -- where he achieves any of the Gothic effects other Lifetime directors have sustained through entire movies. The cast is acceptable, and Sydney Malakeh’s cool villainy is better than that (her only other credit is another Lifetime movie, The Wrong Stepfather, which I seem to have missed, but her combination of smoldering good looks and sinister “cool” would seem to give her a good shot at stardom), but overall Cheer Camp Killer is a pretty ordinary Lifetime production, just another attempt by Lifetime’s management to get straight men to watch their channel by offering them glimpses of scantily clad teenage female flesh. Charles had a hard time with the film because all the cheerleaders looked similarly competent and he had to take it on faith which ones screenwriter White told us were the best -- though I did think Mariah Robinson looked at least a bit better than the others -- and I did like the fact that the film showed Black Mariah Robinson and white Philip McElroy headed for a romance (and a sexual relationship) at the end without making any kind of an issue about it!

Something to Sing About (Grand National, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

As I’ve done on previous weeks when a Lifetime movie wrapped at 10 p.m., Charles was home and he and I had time for another movie, I looked for something in the DVD collection and found it in Something to Sing About, a 1937 musical produced, directed, written and scored by Victor Schertzinger for Grand National Pictures. Grand National was an independent studio founded in 1935 with major ambitions. Its CEO, Edward L. Alperson, wanted to make major pictures with major stars -- and he landed one in 1936 when James Cagney filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Warner Bros. and won in the trial court. Suddenly Cagney was a free agent -- but there were enough gentlemen’s agreements in place between the major studios that none of their production chiefs would risk Jack Warner’s wrath by signing him. Alperson swooped in and offered Cagney a contract to work at Grand National, and for his first film there Alperson gave him Great Guy, the kind of script he’d been making at Warners: a tough crime melodrama in which Cagney played an inspector with the Bureau of Weights and Measures looking to bust food retailers running crooked scales that short-changed customers and suppliers. He even hired Mae Clarke,who’d co-starred with Cagney in two previous films, The Public Enemy (1931) -- she was the woman on the receiving end of Cagney’s famous grapefruit -- and Lady Killer (1933).

Great Guy was both an artistic and a commercial disappointment, so for his second Grand National film Cagney and Alperson decided to get more experimental. Though Something to Sing About is one of Cagney’s most obscure films, he devoted an entire chapter of his autobiography to it, mainly because it was the only musical he got to make between Footlight Parade (1933) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Cagney said in his book that he always considered himself a song-and-dance man at heart and his greatest career regret was that he had got to do so few musicals. Something to Sing About casts Cagney as “Terry Rooney,” true name Thaddeus McGillicuddy, who when the film begins leads a dance band in a New York City nightclub in which he does spectacular dance routines involving a staircase (one wonders if he learned to dance up and down stairs from the same person Fred Astaire got it from -- the great Black tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; there certainly seems to be a lot of Bojangles in Cagney’s excellent dancing here) that suddenly turns into a slide at the end. He also has a girlfriend, Rita Wyatt (screen newcomer Evelyn Daw), who sings with the band and who appears in his floor-show number in which they do a surprisingly Astaire-and-Rogersish move (in the middle of their dance she tries to pull away from him and he yanks her back).

Things take a turn for Our Hero when he gets offered a one-film contract to make a film called Any Old Love for Galor Studios. (Incidentally this film “outs” the 1938 anti-marijuana exploitation film Reefer Madness as a Grand National production; the big car chase in Reefer Madness takes place on a street set built for this film that features a theatre marquee prominently advertising “Terry Rooney in ‘Any Old Love’.” I mention this because there have been a lot of fanciful tales spun about Reefer Madness and the auspices under which it was made.) When he arrives in Hollywood Terry is put through the wringer, introduced to press agent Hank Meyers (William Frawley, best known for playing Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy) and forced to pose suggestively with four young starlets under Galor contract (one of whom was apparently the young Rita Hayworth, who was at Grand National making a Tex Ritter Western) while his true love waits forlornly back in New York, where the band is still performing but business at the nightclub has nose-dived. He calls her person-to-person long-distance (at a time when any phone call out of your local area code -- especially one to the other end of the country -- was hellaciously expensive) and she sings him a new song she and the band have written about how much she misses him, “Right or Wrong.”

At Galor, Terry is confronted by a hair stylist, a makeup person (played by, of all people, Dwight Frye -- how many other movies can you think of which contain both a cast member from I Love Lucy and a cast member from Dracula?) and a vocal coach who tries to get “pear-shaped tones” out of him in a scene copied almost exactly in Singin’ in the Rain 15 years later. Schertzinger and his writing partner, Austin Parker, fill Something to Sing About with lots of fish-out-of-water gags satirizing the Hollywood meatgrinder and what it did to potentially new and innovative talent, and they also make the studio head tell the film’s director and everyone else connected with Any Old Love not to tell Terry how good he is in it, lest he develop a swelled head and “go Hollywood” on them. There’s also a nice anti-racist joke in that Terry has been assigned a Japanese valet, Ito (played by Philip Ahn, who was actually Korean and who would have made a first-rate Charlie Chan if the studios that made the Chan talkies had been interested in casting a real-life Asian) speaking the usual broken-English stereotype -- until he feels comfortable enough around Terry to let his guard drop and speak perfect Engtlish. He later explains that he came to Hollywood hoping for a career as an actor, but .. he leaves it unspoken but I’m sure moviegoers even in 1937 read that scene as the attack on racial stereotyping Schertzinger and Parker no doubt had in mind.

Told throughout the production of Any Old Love that he’s no good -- to which Cagney responds by telling the studio people that if they think he’s so bad they can always fire him and he can go back to leading his band -- and with only Ito and his phone calls to Rita to sustain him emotionally, Terry is about to shoot the final scene of Any Old Love, a bar fight. One of the stunt people explains the “pass” system by which movie fights were staged, but the other guys on the set hate Terry so much they decide to fight him for real -- and Cagney gets his biggest dose of fisticuffs in the film, as the director realizes what’s going on and keeps the cameras rolling so he can liven up the movie with a real on-screen brawl. Terry finishes Any Old Love but then slips out of Hollywood before Galor can sign him to a contract to make another movie; instead he asks Rita to meet him in San Francisco, where he secretly marries her and takes her on a vacation on a tramp steamer to the South Seas. There’s more colorful dancing between Cagney and the sailors, including one who’s in rather crude drag and gets thrown overboard at the end of the sequence.

When they return to San Francisco they find that Any Old Love has become a huge hit and Terry is mobbed by fans as he walks by a movie theatre that’s showing his film. The theatre owner reports him to Galor and the studio head flies out to San Francisco with a contract for a large amount of money but one provision that appalls Terry -- it says he is to remain single for the seven-year term of the contract because the studio is merchandising him as America’s Heartthrob and women moviegoers won’t have fantasies about him if he’s already married. Eventually Terry agrees to Rita’s idea that she be hired by the studio as his “confidential secretary” keeping track of his fan mail so they can at least be together professionally, if not personally, but even that doesn’t work as Terry gets called out to premieres and other public events. What’s worse, Hank Meyers decides to concoct a publicity “romance” between Terry and the co-star of his new film, Steffi Hajos (Mona Barrie, obviously copying real-life Frenchwoman Fifi D’Orsay’s performance as a similar vamp who tried to lure a nice Irish boy in Hollywood, Bing Crosby that time, in the 1933 film Going Hollywood), and there’s a marvelous scene in which Terry and Steffi are talking about how they’re going to break the news to his previous partner that he’s leaving her so he and Steffi can be together … and just when you’re thinking, “Oh, no, he’s going to dump that nice wife of his for the vamp,” then the camera pulls back and it’s revealed that this is only a scene they’re shooting for their film together.

The head of Galor and the film’s director realize that if Terry sees the headline announcing his alleged “engagement” to Steffi before they get the last scene of his film “in the can,” he’ll go ballistic and walk out. They try to intercept anyone who might show him the newspaper with the devastating headline, but he sees it and disappears … ultimately turning up in New York, where the owner of the nightclub where Terry used to perform is advertising “Mrs. Terry Rooney” as their star vocalist. She’s reluctant to go on, to say the least, but agrees to do so to save the band members’ jobs -- and then of course Terry himself crashes the performance, waves in front of his wife’s face a newspaper with a banner headline that his engagement to Steffi was just a P.R. hoax, and the two dance together and presumably live happily ever after as real-life co-stars both on and off the screen.

Though it was a flop at the time, Something to Sing About has held up surprisingly well; its sometimes bitter jokes about the motion picture industry and the treatment of its stars by studio executives no doubt sat well with Cagney, who had got to make it only after a legal dispute with Warners, and Schertzinger proves an able director with a penchant for “breaking the frame” -- for reminding the audience that we are only watching a movie -- would stand him in good stead when he directed the first two Bob Hope-Bing Crosby “Road” films in the early 1940’s. Something to Sing About has a plot that makes sense and portrays characters with real emotional conflicts -- and Cagney rises to the challenge of a part that at once takes advantage of his feisty screen image and lampoons it. Evelyn Daw is also excellent -- why this pleasant-voiced singer and highly talented actress (she gets some unforgettable closeups subtly but unmistakably expressing heartbreak) made only one more film, a Smith Ballew Western called Panamint’s Bad Man, is beyond me - and though this isn’t a heart-rending melodrama like the first “official” version of A Star Is Born (made the same year) it’s one of classic-era Hollywood’s better films about itself.

Alas for Grand National’s fortunes, Warner Bros, appealed the verdict that had allowed Cagney to sign with Grand National and won him back. In turn Grand National sold Warners the third Cagney project they had developed -- a grim tale of the slums, the church and crime called Angels with Dirty Faces written by Rowland Brown, who had hoped to make a comeback as screenwriter and director with that film. Instead Warners put their own people on it -- writer John Wexley and director Michael Curtiz -- and the movie was one of Cagney’s biggest hits and best-remembered films. Grand National itself stuck it out for two more years, mostly on the profits from their musical Westerns with Tex Ritter, before going out of business and selling what was left of the company to RKO. Alas, the print we were watching (from an American Movie Classics DVD) didn’t include Grand National’s charming logo -- a clock tower in which the hands of the clock wiped in the company’s name across its face.

*batteries not included (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, 1987)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Monday, October 5 my husband Charles and I watched a movie from 1987 that I hadn’t seen back then and he couldn’t recall whether he’d seen or not: *batteries not included. (That typography on the title -- all lower-case and with an asterisk at the beginning -- is what appears on the opening title and in the official trailer.) Although Steven Spielberg didn’t personally direct it -- Matthew Robbins did, though Spielberg is credited as “executive producer” and his company, Amblin Entertainment, is listed as one of the producing studios -- *batteries not included is very much in the same sort of extraterrestrial whimsy that produced Spielberg’s acclaimed and highly popular E.T. five years before. *batteries not included was written by a committee -- Mick Garris got “story by” credit and the screenplay was credited to Brad Bird & Matthew Robbins and Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson. Those otherwise redundant combinations of ampersands and “ands” are Writers’ Guild-speak meaning that Garris passed his “original” story to Bird and Robbins, who worked collaboratively until the producers (including Spielberg and his then-business partner Kathleen Kennedy) brought another pair of collaborators, Maddock and Wilson, for rewrites.

The result was a quite charming film set in New York City, particularly in an old, decaying block of Eighth Avenue that is part of the super-parcel on which billionaire land developer Lacey (Michael Greene) wants to build a mega-parcel that’s going to displace the tenants and make Lacey a ton of money. Lacey has assigned the task of getting rid of the current tenants of 817 Eighth Avenue, virtually the only building still standing on the land where he wants to put his mega-project, to his assistant Kovacs (John Pankow). Kovacs has in turn hired a gang of Mexican-American cholos headed by Carlos (Michael Carmine, easily the sexiest man in the movie even though -- or maybe because -- he’s supposed to be playing a bad-ass thug), whose assignment is either to bribe or intimidate the current tenants into leaving so Lacey can take over the building, destroy it and build his super-project before his approvals from the city run out. We then meet the tenants of the building, who turn out to be the most lovable and charming people the writing committee could create.

The leads are Frank and Faye Riley, played by the real-life long-term married couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy -- Tandy in particular played so many of these crotchety or (as here) slightly demented but at heart lovable old ladies in her later years it’s hard to remember she was the first Blanche DuBois in the 1947 original Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (and as good as Vivien Leigh’s performance was in the 1951 film -- in which she was surrounded by the other three principals of the original stage cast, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden -- it’s a pity Tandy’s performance in the role could not also have been preserved). Indeed, one of the most amazing things about *batteries not included is that the lead actors are both old people -- Hollywood wasn’t big on making movies featuring old people in 1987 and if anything their ageist prejudices are even worse today -- and though there are some younger people cast as their fellow tenants none of them were picked for sexiness or physical appeal.

The Rileys run an old-fashioned coffee shop (back when that term meant a restaurant that served fast food but wasn’t part of a chain, as opposed to a coffeehouse) and their fellow tenants in the building include Mason Baylor (Dennis Boutskaris), son of an upper-class father who’s interested in pursuing a career as a painter and preserving historic buildings -- his girlfriend moves out on him early on because she thinks the place is a pigsty and she doesn’t want to be there anymore -- along with Marisa Esteval (Elisabeth Pena), a youngish Latina who’s pregnant by her boyfriend (a traveling musician named Hector), though she and Mason are predictably drawn to each other as the film progresses; and Harry Noble (Frank McRae), a long-retired African-American boxer who’s virtually catatonic until … but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Carlos and his cholos leave envelopes in cash at the doors of the remaining tenants, who call it “blood money” and won’t move, so Carlos decides to attack -- literally -- by having his crew go in Riley’s cafe with hammers and baseball bats and smash everything in sight, from the glass cupboards containing the dessert items to the jukebox that only plays 78’s (an indication of how thoroughly time has passed the Rileys by) and the old photos showing the Rileys at various crucial moments in their lives -- represented by actual photos of Cronyn and Tandy taken over the years by Arthur “Weegee” Fellig (whose last name lost one of its “l”’s in the closing credits) and other photographers of similar reputation and vintage.

Half an hour into the film, when it’s clear the people living in the building need some sort of deus ex machina to save their homes, one dutifully appears -- though perhaps it’s more of a machinus ex dea: a pair of toy-like flying saucers. The little saucers are tiny -- under a foot in diameter -- and for a while it’s unclear as to whether they house miniature living beings or are themselves their planet’s dominant life form. What’s more, there seems to be a gender differentiation between the two, with one seeming “male” and one seeming “female,” and in the middle of the movie, when they’re not working their high-tech magic to save the tenants and their building from extinction at the hands of a sinister super-rich land developer (and in 2020 it’s hard not to believe the writers based at least some of the villain’s characterization on Donald Trump -- 1987 was the year the real Trump pushed his way out of the trash-fame of the New York tabloids and “wrote” his alleged autobiography The Art of the Deal, thereby becoming one of those people you suddenly hear of all over the place and feel like you’re expected both to know and to care who they are when in fact you do neither), they manage to have whatever sort of sex they have and produce a litter of three even tinier saucers as their offspring. (It’s an ironic reversal of Spielberg’s claim that the title character of E.T. was an animate plant, was 10,000 years old and its species didn’t have sex or gender differences and reproduced by budding.)

The little saucers live on metal and electrical energy -- they have to plug themselves into wall sockets to keep going (and sometimes they have difficulty doing this in ways that are funnier now than they were in 1987, given both the modern-day ubiquity of cell phones and the difficulty their owners frequently face in getting them to recharge) and they eat some of the tenants’ housewares and regurgitate them into quirky works of art. They also have an extraordinary power to fix things: the night after Carlos and his cholos have wrecked the Rileys’ cafe the saucers have cleaned it up and got it in working order so the Rileys can reopen it on schedule for their morning trade. Later, when Carlos and Kovacs set the entire building on fire through a combination of an acid trigger and breaking open its gas pipes, and nothing is left but the stoop in front (where we see Mason sitting forlornly, obviously regretting the loss of both his home and something he considers an architectural landmark), in a scene I suspect was inspired by the legendary French short The Red Balloon an entire army of animate (or semi-animate) UFO’s from the same planet descend on that block of New York and reconstruct the entire building overnight.

There’s also the marvelously poignant plot gimmick of having Faye Riley suffering just enough signs of age-related dementia that she occasionally has the delusion that Carlos is actually her long-dead son Bobby -- even though she has a newspaper clipping about how Bobby died (at 18 in a car accident) -- and the anger she trains on him (just as we’re starting to like him because he’s changed sides and is now trying to help the Rileys) when she suddenly realizes, “You’re not Bobby!” *batteries not included has some flaws -- the title is barely explained (we hear it only twice, once in a TV toy commercial and once from Harry Noble after he manages, in a quirky combination of mechanical work and tender loving care, to nurse the last of the saucers’ three offspring -- the runt of their litter -- back to full life); the references to other movies seem a bit arch; at times director Robbins and the writing committee (which included him) seemed to be trying too hard to make this into another E.T.; and Charles thought the final gag -- Lacey’s super-project gets built after all but with the restored brownstone sitting in the middle of it -- just too overused and corny.

It occurred to me that the ending would have been stronger if Lacey had changed the design of his project to make the new buildings match the design of the old brownstone and created a new community with some of the flair of the old, including a set-aside for affordable housing. Not only would that have given us a sense that Lacey had undergone a Scrooge-like regeneration, it would also have made this film’s rather muddled politics (the principal bad guy is a fat-cat capitalist but his “enforcers” are Trump-like negative stereotypes of Latinos as vicious thugs) more consistently progressive. But overall I quite liked *batteries not included; the word I keep coming back to is “charming,” and there’s a sort of old-school old-pro aspect about the performances of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy that gives the other actors something to play off against and brings dignity and strength to the whole movie.

Cheer Squad Secrets (ROP Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime ran yet another “new” movie in their “Fear the Cheer” themed series, called Cheer Squad Secrets -- though there’s really only one major titular secret in the cheer squad at Brooksville South Side High School, and that is that the faculty member who’s supposed to be the cheerleading coach, Nina Sednak (Anne Brown), is not only running the squad like a drill sergeant but is slipping her cheerleaders steroids to improve their performance and endurance. The central characters are Scott (Matthew Kevin Anderson) and Kelly (Margaret Anne Florence -- what happened? Were her parents unable to decide on a first name for her, so they gave her three of them?) Regan and their daughter Amelie (Karis Cameron). Amelie is a tall, rather stout young woman who looks so unlike either of her screen parents I was waiting for writer Nick Barzini to drop a line in his script that she was adopted -- during scenes showing the family together Amelie towers over both her folks.

For some reason Barzini never really explains, Amelie is desperate to get on the school’s cheerleading squad and ride with it to a national championship -- in her own high-school days her mom Kelly was a member of a cheerleading squad that actually did win the nationals, and mom still has the ring she won. The film begins with the sudden death of Ethan Walker (Kaden Connors, who’s so much hotter than any other male in the film it’s a real pity to lose him less than half an hour in), who got a bottle of illegal steroids from Amelie’s friend and fellow cheerleader Lisa (Sunny Chen), used it, got a bad case of “‘roid rage” that led him to get into an argument with a fellow driver in a parking lot (this is an affluent enough high school it seems every student there has their own car) and ends up dying of a heart attack in the middle of the parking lot.

Nina, we learn gradually in a series of flashbacks, is driven by a mania that formed when her own career as a would-be national-winning cheerleader was abruptly ended when she got pregnant from the grown-up athletic coach at the school she was having an affair with even though she was underage (and who, we later learn, is still there). She suffered a miscarriage that scarred her insides so badly she could never again have a child of her own -- she gets a nicely smarmy line of dialogue to the effect that because she can’t have kids herself she treats all the members of the cheerleading squad as her daughters, this while she’s not only drilling them like a Devil’s Island commandant but feeding them drugs that are unhinging them. While all this is going on Kelly and her business partner Nat (Laura Mac -- that’s how she’s billed, though her full name is Laura K. MacDonald) are also running a boutique maker of summer clothes and are approaching laid-back venture capitalist Marley Pickett (played by an actor billed as -- I kid you not -- Jesse James) for money to expand.

Nina is so determined to get her cheerleading squad to the nationals that she starts knocking off anyone she thinks is in her way, including her drug dealer (who has figured out who she is and why she wants his stuff, and decides to try to blackmail her into paying more -- big mistake!) and Kelly’s business partner Nat, who catches Nina after she’s broken into Kelly’s home to plant steroids in Amelie’s room and also to steal Kelly’s old cheerleading championship ring. To protect herself further Nina, like the coach in Dying to Be a Cheerleader, is also having an affair with the school principal -- though she keeps him in line by threatening to report him for sexual harassment if he does anything that might get in her way -- so Kelly files what’s essentially a whistleblower complaint with the school superintendent and he suspends Nina from her job as cheerleading coach just before the nationals. Of course Nina determines to go anyway and recruits Amelie, who’s also been suspended, by saying the nationals aren’t a school-sponsored event and thereby it’s O.K. for her to attend them.

The climax is a typical Lifetime confrontation scene in which Nina lures Kelly to the school in the dead of night by stealing Amelie’s phone and sending Kelly a text from it asking her to meet Amelie there -- of course it’s a trap, and director David Langlois shoots it with a quite nice Gothic atmosphere, all shadows and flashes of colored lights that give the hulking mass of the school building a sinister aura. Kelly finds her daughter bound and gagged, and Nina overpowers her and strings her up in a classic bondage pose from the spigot of the school shower -- but Kelly is able to kick Nina (for some reason Nina failed to bind her legs), overpower her, free her daughter and get away -- Nina finally corners them but just then the police arrive (Kelly’s husband Scott -- ya remember Kelly’s husband Scott? -- called them) and take Nina into custody.

Cheer Squad Secrets is a pretty dorky and formulaic Lifetime movie, but it’s redeemed by one performance -- and that’s surprisingly not the actress playing the villain, but the one playing the heroine. Karis Cameron’s performance as Amelie is chillingly effective, dramatizing the plight of this young woman torn between two strong mother figures -- her real mom and Nina -- gradually succumbing to ‘roid rage and so dedicated to her cheerleading and to Nina that she blows off a mother-daughter fundraising event the Regans have been attending every year for quite some time. While I can see Cameron being quite difficult to cast as she grows up -- she’s already unusually large (though well proportioned) for a woman -- here she’s overpowering, dominating every scene she’s in and vividly dramatizing both the character’s inner strength and her vulnerability. It’s quite a performance and it deserved to be showcased in a better movie -- though I also give director Langlois credit for a much stronger command of atmospherics than we usually get in a Lifetime director.

Dying to Be a Cheerleader (MarVista Entertainment, Robbins Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched what was advertised as a “new” Lifetime movie (for some reason they’re not using the “Premiere” designation anymore, and given that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic disrupted film and TV production all around the world it’s something of an open question how “new” these movies are even if they’ve never publicly been shown before). The film was part of their “Fear the Cheer” theme weekends about all the skulduggery young high-school girls will commit against each other, each other’s families and the school authorities for the sake of becoming cheerleaders -- though the task of being a cheerleader is quite a bit different from what it was in my own high-school days. Actually, as I recall, in high school and junior college the cheerleaders were divided into “Yell Leaders” and “Song Leaders,” and there were four yell leaders -- two boys and two girls -- and seven song leaders, all girls. The yell leaders did the chants from the sidelines at the big games and the song leaders actually did quasi-dance routines to records (and since I went to a high school with a large proportion of Black students at the height of the soul-music movement in the 1960’s they were doing their routines to the big Motown hits and quite a lot of other genuinely good songs).

This one was released under the risible title Dying to Be a Cheerleader and was originally filmed under the title Killer Cheerleader (and it’s possible the change was because Lifetime had already done a Killer Cheerleader before) and was directed by Tom Shell from a script by David Chester. It’s basically the Lifetime chestnut of the rivalry between the Good Cheerleader and the Bad Cheerleader for dominance of the cheerleading squad (and the modern-day cheerleaders depicted in this and other Lifetime movies in the killer-cheerleader genre are more like the song leaders than the yell leaders of my own long-ago high school days), though writer Chester gave both the rivals (as well as the mother figure -- more on her later) some interesting complexities that made this at least potentially more interesting than the normal run of Lifetime movies. The Good Cheerleader, Darcy Daniels (Dominique Booth), isn’t all that good: both her parents are dead, and though her mom sort-of raised her she was locked into a cycle of alcoholism, drug abuse and petty crime to support her substance habits, with the result that Darcy was constantly moved, could never count on remaining in the same school for more than a month or so, and in a lot of ways became the adult in the relationship, constantly putting her mom to bed after she came home more than the worse for wear after her latest binge. (About the only thing Darcy seems to have escaped is being sexually assaulted herself by one of mom’s boyfriends de jour.)

She’s only in the high-end suburban community because her maternal aunt, Cassandra Tuxford (Ashlynn Yennie, top-billed and pretty sexy herself in the filmy tops and blue jeans she generally dresses in even at work as the community’s most successful realtor), has agreed to be her guardian. She has zero experience as a parent -- she explains that she was so determined to be a business success she didn’t have time to do things like date, much less get married and have kids -- she says she took in Darcy to atone for her guilt at not being able to do anything to save Darcy’s mom. Along the way Darcy picked up a criminal record of her own, mostly for shoplifting but also including two counts of arson -- though she says one was an accident and one was a prank that went badly wrong. The Bad Cheerleader is Taylor Jennings (Kalen Bull, who turns in a finely honed performance and creates a characterization a cut above most of the hot young blondes who play Lifetime’s Perky Psycho Babes), the captain of the Amazons cheerleading squad at the ultra-exclusive suburban high school where all this takes place. She choreographs the dance routines and in the opening sequences is upset at the sloppiness of Tracy Trench (Tristina Lee Bryant), the squad’s one Black member -- though there’s at least a hint that Taylor’s problem with Tracy is simple racism -- and the “problem” solves itself when Tracy gets tripped after leaving a cheerleading practice and breaks her leg. This opens up a slot on the cheerleading squad and the coach, Janice Phillips (Casey O’Keefe), announces open tryouts.

Darcy shows up and -- at least according to what the script tells us (she looked O.K. to me but not as overwhelming as writer Chester said she was) -- aces the tryout, but Taylor blackmails Coach Phillips and tells her that if she puts Darcy on the squad, Taylor will tell her parents -- both of whom are on the school board -- that Phillips is having an affair with the school’s married principal (Jon Bridell) and both principal and coach will be fired. So the hapless coach puts another girl on the squad and Darcy goes back home and nurses her grievances. Darcy got on Taylor’s shit list for allegedly cruising her boyfriend Brandon Hollister (Christian Rivera, who for some reason is given a curly nerd hairdo that makes him look dorky -- his imdb,com head shot actually makes him look considerably sexier than this film does), though all that happened between them was that she dropped her books and Brandon helped her pick them up. Brandon insists that he wanted to break up with Taylor anyway, while Darcy has attracted a much hotter (at least to me!) guy named Warren (alas not listed on imdb,com), but of course Taylor still considers Brandon her property. Midway through the movie another cheerleader, Madison (Grace Patterson), gets cornered in the shower by an unseen assailant -- though she’s not wielding a knife and she isn’t really the school taxidermy teacher in drag, director Shell was obviously inspired by Hitchcock’s Psycho here). She’s shoved against the tile wall of the school shower, dies and isn’t discovered until the school janitor lets himself in to clean up the next morning.

Madison’s death opens up yet another slot on the cheerleading squad, and this time Coach Phillips puts Darcy on the squad and defies Taylor’s blackmail threat -- only at the first practice Taylor and Darcy get into a fight and Coach Phillips kicks them both off the squad. Along about this time Darcy borrows a drone -- I’m not making this up, you know -- her aunt Cassandra uses to monitor local properties she might be able to list and intends to use it to film the cheerleader practices from above so she and the other girls can see how they’re doing (the fact that they could do this almost as well by setting up someone’s video-equipped cell phone to film the routines doesn’t seem to have occurred to writer Chester), only someone steals it from Darcy’s school locker (someone who’s able to pick the lock with a bent paper clip -- for such a high-end high school the security leaves a lot to be desired) and uses it to attack Taylor’s sometime boyfriend Brandon (ya remember Brandon?) while he’s on his electric scooter, breaking his arm. The next thing we know we see Coach Phillips leaving the motel after one of her assignations with the principal -- she justifies continuing the affair by saying the principal has promised to divorce his wife so they can marry, and my husband Charles joked, “Oh, you didn’t believe the old ‘I’m-going-to-divorce-my-wife’ line, did you?”) -- and being caught inside her car by a stalker who strangles her and leaves her dead.

The cops immediately suspect Darcy -- after all, she is the one with the criminal record -- but the writer drops us a big hint when he mentions that Taylor’s best friend April (Nicolette Langley) is on psych meds (we know this because we see texts from April’s parents -- whom we never actually see -- on her phone, “Did you take your meds today?” and we get the obligatory scene in which April not only goes off her meds but sweeps them to the floor of her bedroom with her forearm). It leads to a climax at an old deserted house that used to be in April’s family, in which she kidnaps Darcy, ties her up and spreads gasoline all over the place because she wants it to look like the convicted arsonist Darcy decided to end it all by immolating herself, since she likes fire so much. Only Cassandra catches on to what’s happening -- Darcy had actually planned to leave her aunt’s home, since she’s perfectly capable of fending for herself, but April grabbed her before she could do that -- and she enlists Taylor to help her find her niece, figuring that Taylor would be most likely to know where April would take a person she had kidnapped. Taylor suddenly turns to the side of good as she helps Cassandra find her seemingly errant but actually kidnapped niece, and they trace her to the deserted house (where fortunately there’s still cell-phone service so they can call the police -- usually Lifetime stages their climaxes in out-of-the-way places the villains have selected because there isn’t cell service that far out -- though there were a few touch-and-go moments where Taylor’s GPS faded out and she wasn’t sure she was directing Cassandra correctly).

The finale is a typical Lifetime roundelay in which April turns out to have a gun and a knife, she loses the gun when Taylor conks her on the head with an ornate lamp that appears to be the nearest and most convenient blunt object, ultimately Darcy frees herself from April’s rather crude attempt at bondage and ultimately grabs the gun and shoots April, though not before she gives a tearful confession that she did all of this because she thought Taylor was perfect and she wanted them to be together their whole lives. It’s not every Lifetime movie in which the psycho’s motive is an unrequited Lesbian crush! Dying to Be a Cheerleader is one of Lifetime’s better movies in the killer-cheerleader sub-genre: the acting is quite good all around, with Nicolette Langley especially good in her final scene in which she confesses her love for Taylor and her regret that she’s going to have to kill Taylor, Cassandra and Darcy so no one will find out her secret. (Yeah, right.)

Though one wonders how Dick Wolf’s writers would have done the second part of a Law and Order episode on this plot -- had April survived there would have been innumerable snarls about how to try her (as a juvenile? As an adult? Would her lawyers have been able to get her off on diminished-capacity defense and been able to have her institutionalized instead of sent to prison -- and could have that set up a Dying to Be a Cheerleader II in which she’d have formed a similarly outsized crush on one of her fellow inmates?) -- Dying to Be a Cheerleader, despite a stupid title and some hoary plot devices David Chester should have been ashamed of, is actually a quite good thriller (though Charles was disappointed that Chester revealed the identity of the real criminal too soon and didn’t keep us guessing among his wide array of suspects) despite a confusing flashback scene towards the end that for a moment had me dreading that Chester would pull a last-minute reversal and have Darcy turn out to be the homicidally crazy villainess … it turns out just to be a literal flashback of Darcy returning to the motel where she and her mother were then staying and Darcy discovering mom dead of an O.D. Whew! Scared me there for a moment, David Chester!

Topper Returns (Hal Roach Productions, United Artists, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Dying to Be a Cheerleader I had originally intended to stay on Lifetime for the next film in their “Fear the Cheer” theme weekend, but after the first scene I realized I’d seen it before and decided to spare Charles the ordeal of watching two Lifetime movies in a row. Instead I looked through the DVD backlog and found Topper Returns, third and last of a three-film series Hal Roach produced from 1937 to 1941. The original Topper was based on a ghost novel by Thorne Smith (who also wrote Turnabout, also filmed by Hal Roach, in which a man and a woman switch bodies: an obvious precursor to the 1984 film All of Me, with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin in the parts in which Roach had cast John Hubbard and Carole Landis) and featured Constance Bennett and Cary Grant as a couple of irresponsible young and party-hearty one-percenters who crash their fancy car and die, but for some reason survive as ghosts and haunt staid, boring banker Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) and his ditzy wife Clara (Billie Burke -- noting her most famous credit, as Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, I joked, “She hasn’t been the same since they repossessed her bubble”) to liven up their lives.

There was a surprisingly dull sequel a year later called Topper Takes a Trip, in which Bennett, Young and Burke reprised their roles but, alas, Cary Grant didn’t -- and then this one from 1941 in which the ghost is Gail Richards (Joan Blondell, now out of the Warners complex but still playing her voice-of-reason character), who’s on a trip with her friend Ann Carrington (Carole Landis, whom both Roach and, later, 20th Century-Fox had big hopes for but who had a messy personal life: she went through three husbands and was divorcing her fourth when she died; she also had an affair with Rex Harrison and supposedly killed herself when he went back to his wife, thereby making his name mud in Hollywood until his enormous success in My Fair Lady on Broadway in 1956 revitalized his career) when an unseen sniper (we see the gun, not the shooter) shoots out a tire on the taxi taking Ann and Gail to Ann’s ancestral mansion to see her father John Carrington (H. B. Warner) at long last. It seems that though they were both Americans they met in Singapore, and dad wanted to return home while mom was so enamored of Asian culture she decided to stay there while she was still pregnant with Ann, ultimately settling in Shanghai and raising Ann there.

The Carrington fortune was made from a tungsten mine in China John Carrington owned and ran with a partner, Hastings, until Hastings was killed in an accident at the mine, Carrington took over and ultimately settled on the New England coast somewhere (the writers -- pulp mystery scribe Jonathan Latimer, future director Gordon Douglas and “additional dialogue” writer Paul Edward Smith -- aren’t all that specific about the film’s geography, but the Carrington house is at the edge of a big bluff and there’s a long way down the cliffs to the shore below, not that that becomes much of a plot issue) and is looking forward to seeing the daughter he knows about and has received letters from but has never met. His doctor, Jeris (George Zucco, marvelous as usual), warns him not to get too excited and doesn’t seem to be up to any good. Though Ann and Gail both survived the sniper attack on the road, Gail is killed by a mysterious-looking man in a black cloak, a black hat and a face-covering mask (today he’d be right in style!) but she gets to turn into a ghost so she can hang around long enough to protect Ann and find who’s after her for the Carrington fortune -- since before they went to bed for the last time Ann and Gail had switched rooms. It seems that John Carrington had designated the “Chinese suite” for her because she’d grown up there, but Ann wanted nothing more to do with anything from China and so she and Gail switched rooms, thereby getting killed by an assassin who was really targeting Ann.

What’s amazing about Topper Returns -- which I thought was the funniest of the three when I saw them all in rapid succession in the 1980’s -- is that the writers are able to balance mystery, horror and comedy impeccably, enough that I’m considering adding Topper Returns to my short list of the greatest horror-comedies ever made (The Bride of Frankenstein, the Bob Hope vehicle Ghost Breakers, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the original Ghostbusters). Part of the film’s success is due to the excellent supporting cast, including Raffaela Ottiano as the Carringtons’ racially ambiguous housekeeper (think a fusion of Judith Anderson in Rebecca and Gale Sondergaard in The Letter and you’ve got her); Patsy Kelly as Topper’s maid (her voice-of-reason characterization is an asset to just about every film she made) and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson as Topper’s chauffeur.

Anderson was that rarity in 1930’s movies, a Black comic-relief character who played a servant who is still funny -- all too often the Black servant characters got tagged with horrible names like “Stepin Fetchit,” “G. Howe Black” or “Sleep ‘n’ Eat” (“Sleep ‘n’ Eat” was really Willie Best, and Bob Hope -- who was anti-racist when anti-racism wasn’t cool -- lobbied producers to bill him under his real name but was not able to get him better roles). Anderson and Mantan Moreland were somehow able to tweak the disgusting dumb-Black servant stereotype and play streetwise instead of stupid. It helped that Anderson’s regular gig was on Jack Benny’s radio show, and Benny was famous for letting all his sidekicks score off him; there’s even a reference to that when Anderson is packing to leave the Carrington mansion and says, “I’m going back to Mr. Benny; he never put me through anything like this!”

Along the way Anderson discovers a trick chair in the Carringtons’ living room which plunges whoever sits in it down a long vertical tunnel into the ocean below -- for some reason the house is built on top of at least one mining tunnel and an underground pool that leads to the open ocean, where a crew of three waits to take Gail Richards’ body on a rowboat to a small ship in the open sea -- and later the cab driver who we saw in the opening scene reappears because he’s taken a shine to Ann Carrington and also wants to protect her from whoever wants to kill her for the Carrington inheritance. Along the way most of the dramatis personae are locked into a walk-in freezer in the Carringtons’ kitchen -- ironically Billie Burke complains the loudest even though out of all of them she’s dressed the warmest (in a big fur coat that in 1941 made people think of luxury and ostentation, and now makes people think of cruelty to animals) -- and two of the crew members on that little ship get into a fight because each one thinks the other is turning off the engine. (It’s actually Gail’s ghost, who unlike most movie ghosts can appear at will to anyone or turn herself invisible, and can also manipulate objects -- there’s a nice scene reminiscent of the Invisible Man movies in which she smokes a cigarette while invisible so the cigarette appears to be smoking itself in mid-air.) This scene is about the closest this movie ever gets to the rough-hewn slapstick that had been Hal Roach’s stock in trade before he decided to use the profits from the Laurel and Hardy movies to make a run at big-time productions as well as big-time stars.

The mystery finally gets resolved when the cab driver, played by a very young Dennis O’Keefe, finds the chain inside the fireplace that sets off the booby trap on that chair, and he figures he can get Gail’s killer to confess by tricking him into sitting in the chair and then getting up when he sees O’Keefe’s character reach out for the control. The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] John Carrington himself -- or rather Hastings, since he killed John Carrington back in China, took over his half of the mining fortune, used it to establish himself in the U.S. and is determined to kill Ann Carrington so there’ll be no one left with a legal claim to the money. Obviously this was going to be a real surprise to the 1941 audience, not only because H. B. Warner has played him with such a gentle, loving mien but because by far his most famous credit, then or now, was as Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 King of Kings. (Also the masked, hooded, caped killer looked too big and too robust to be the short, skinny H. B. Warner, though maybe there was a co-conspirator.) There’s another twist to the ending in which Carrington is attempting to flee in his big car, Topper’s car is chasing him with no one visibly at the wheel (Gail’s ghost is driving) and Carrington’s car goes off the road, killing him and turning him into Gail’s unwelcome ghost companion “until I can get this sorted out, I go to heaven and you go to … that other place.”

Topper Returns is a really nice movie, fun in ways that aren’t always the expected ones and an odd outlier in the history of American cinema, an unpretentious mixture of comedy, horror (the Carrington mansion looks like, and may very well have been, a borrowed set from Universal’s horror films), mystery and drama that holds up marvelously well, a kind of filmmaking the studio system was good at -- the director was Roy Del Ruth, who had a decades-long career making all sorts of movies including the first (and surprisingly good, though not a patch on John Huston’s classic) The Maltese Falcon in 1931 -- that by now has become virtually a lost art.