Green Hell (Famous Productions, Universal, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Given the uncertainties around my husband Charles’ schedule, I chose last night, April 21, to be the evening on which we finished the James Whale oeuvre and watched the last three films in his canon: Green Hell (1940), They Dare Not Love (1941) and his final film, an experimental short based on a play by William Saroyan called Hello Out There (1949). Green Hell is an insignificant movie artistically but it’s quite important as a landmark in Hollywood history, It was the brainchild of Harry Edington, who in the late 1920’s had won a reputation as Hollywood’s most legendary agent. He was able to attract a stellar list of clients largely on the strength of the contracts he had extracted from MGM for their two biggest stars, John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. In 1940 he decided to become a movie producer, and he thought of a plan that would become one of the most important and most common ways movies would get made after the disintegration of the studio system in the 1950’s. Edington’s model was to put together a film project entirely from his clients, assembling a story, writer, director and cast and offering the whole package to whatever studio wanted to take it on on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. He wouldn’t succeed in this venture – Green Hell was his only film as a producer, and it was both a commercial and critical disaster – but other agents like Charles K. Feldman and Lew Wasserman would adopt Edington’s business model and prosper with it. In fact, Wasserman prospered with it so much that eventually he was able to buy Universal, the venerable studio with which Edington finally cut the deal to make Green Hell.

I remember watching this with Charles early on in our relationship and wondering how on earth a film with a great screenwriter, Frances Marion; a great director, James Whale; and a cast that, if not great, was at least serviceable – Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Bennett, George Sanders, Alan Hale, Vincent Price and John Howard – could come up with a movie this silly. According to James Whale’s biographer, James Curtis, the real problem was Frances Marion. She had become one of Hollywood’s most regarded writers in the silent era because, Curtis argued, silent films emphasized what she was good at – constructing a coherent story and dividing it into scenes that could be filmed – and didn’t require her to write dialogue. When sound came in Marion was under contract to MGM, whose studio chief, Irving Thalberg, used Marion’s talents as a story constructionist and assigned other people – usually Anita Loos – to fill in the dialogue. Alas, when Thalberg died in 1936 the new management at MGM let Marion go and she was on her own. One particularly silly line Curtis quotes from Green Hell is when the white male explorers looking for Inca ruins in the rain forests of Peru (so you thought Peru was all mountains and desert? Obviously Frances Marion didn’t, though I recall reading somewhare that enough of the Amazon rain forest overlaps into Peruvian territory that this isn’t quite as silly as I thought it was when I was watching it)) bring in a woman they’ve found and take her to their camp while she’s unconscious. One of the explorers asks if there’s anything wrong with her, and he’s told, “Just a coma” – a line that apparently brought laughter when Green Hell was previewed before release and various people, including Whale himself, wanted it deleted from the final cut. It’s still there.

Green Hell Is one of those stupid Holliywood jungle movies, with whites in the jungle dealing with such menaces as alligators (the usual stock clips appear) and cannibals, who besiege them at the end of the film with the general idiocy of John Ford’s Indians or Peter Jackson’s orcs. Totally unable to use their numerical advantage in any significant way, they’re sitting ducks for the good natives who come in like Ford’s Seventh Cavalry at the end and rescue all these silly white people from becoming the cannibals’ latest main course. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. – speaking with the British accent he picked up from his decades of living there (when his dad relocated to Britain following the breakup of his marriage to Mary Pickford, Jr. stayed there and eventually became so “native” a lot of people thought he was English) – is an explorer who when he travels in Peru is surrounded by so many native girls they’re basically groupies. He heads an expedition ostensibly fronted by scientist Dr. Loren (Alan Hale) and including Forrester (George Sanders, who as usual in his otherwise bad movies plays the part with a world-weary hauteur that steals the film from the rest of the cast; Sanders was a fine actor and in the hands of a director who knew what to do with him, like Alfred Hitchcock or Douglas Sirk, he made a great impression, but somehow Whale wasn’t able to get that much out of him, at least with Marion’s cardboard script), Hal Scott (the typically useless John Howard, who spent his career playing drips even in otherwise good movies like Lost Horizon and The Philadelphia Story), “Tex” Morgan (George Bancroft in a schticky comic-relief performance that had Universal had its druthers in the casting would probably have gone to Andy Devine), and Richardson (Vincent Price – one ot the legendary horror stars made a movie for one of the legendary horror directors and it was not a horror film!), who gets killed about a half-hour in.

Joan Bennett plays his wife, who had followed him into the jungle, only she doesn’t arrive until after he’s killed by natives and when she recovers from that non-serious coma the guys have to break the news to her. Of course, now that she’s a not-so-merry widow both Fairbanks and Sanders cruise her, and she seems undecided until the cannibals in the final scene render the choice academic by knocking Sanders off. About all Green Hell has to recommend it is some good special-effects work by Universal’s go-to guy for trick shots, John P. Fulton – the gushes of water that threaten to drown the principals’ camp are especially well done – and the professional acting of Sanders and Price, who stand out if only because they’re able to convey the impression that they take Marion’s tripe seriously. (Later Price would get a lot of scripts that were even worse than this one, and he’d respond by camping them up on purpose, essentially winking to the audience, “I don’t take one word of this garbage seriously – and you shouldn’t, either!”)

They Dare Not Love (Columbia, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Though we were watching it on a grey-label DVD with a couple of glitches in the middle, They Dare Not Love turned out to be a much better movie than either its predecessor or its reputation. It has virtually no reputation because James Whale, working for Columbia Pictures and its notoriously mean-spirited producer Harry Cohn, got fired from the film before it was finished and two directors, Victor Fleming and Charles Vidor, were put on it to replace him. (Fleming had previously taken over even more troubled productions like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind and brought them to completion, though Fleming was taken off Wizard to take over Gone With the Wind, and but Fleming got sole credit he only did the Oz scenes: King Vidor shot the prologue and epilogue in Kansas, including the most famous clip of Judy Garland’s career: her introduction of “Over the Rainbow.”)

They Dare Not Love was released May 16, 1941 and was therefore the product of a particularly fraught time in Hollywood’s – and America’s – relationship with World War II. The U.S. was not yet a combatant but President Franklin Roosevelt was clearly “tilting” the country in the direction of the Allies, particularly Britain, with decisions like the destroyers-for-bases deal and the passage of the Lend-Lease Act. The Hollywood studios – who were regularly being accused by isolationists of creating pro-Allied propaganda because they were mostly headed by Jews – in fact treaded cautiously: before 1941 only a handful of anti-Nazi films ere made in the U.S. (Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Beasts of Berlin, The Mortal Storm), and most of them were personal projects of directors like Frank Borzage or stars like Edward G. Robinson who persuaded reluctant studio heads to greenlight them. Mostly Hollywood, like pre-war Britain and France, tried to appease the Nazis. Whale himself had suffered from this when his 1937 film The Road Back. set in Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War I. was censored at the behest of the German consul in Los Angeles and released only in heavily butchered form. At a time when American movie companies were still allowed to release their films in Nazi Germany, they went so far to appease the Nazis that Louis B. Mayer sent Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment an affidavit that Clark Gable was uncircumcised so the Nazis would be assured he wasn’t Jewish and would therefore continue to allow his films to be shown in Germany.

By the time Harry Cohn greenlighted They Dare Not Love America’s pro-Allied “tilt” had become strong enough studio heads were more concerned about offending the U.S. government and therefore started trickling out more anti-Nazi films. Written by Charles Bennett (the writer who was basically to Alfred Hitchcock what Robert Riskin was to Frank Capra, or Dudley Nichols to John Ford: Bennett wrote six of Hitchcock’s films as well as the source play for a seventh, and many of the devices we think of as “Hitchcockian” were originally created on Bennett’s pages) and Ernest Vajda (whom Whale had worked with in his glory days at the Laemmles’ Universal), They Dare Not Love begins with a series of titles explaining that Hitler and his forces have just occupied Austria and some gripping scenes showing the consequences of this for ordinary Austrians. (There’s been a lot of historical debate as to whether Austria, which Hitler annexed on March 11, 1938, was “Hitler’s first victim” – as the Austrians themselves like to say – or Hitler’s willing partner, since there were plenty of Austrian Nazis, some of them in high government positions, who were all too eager to become part of the Reich,. A bit of this debate actually enters into the script of They Dare Not Love, but the film takes the position that Austrians are not Germans and Hitler’s annexation was a conquest, not a friendly takeover.)

The opening sequences of They Dare Not Love seem to be the scenes in James Whale’s later career that (aside from the dungeon scenes in The Man in the Iron Mask, a good but workmanlike film that could have been directed by just about anybody) turned him on more than anything he’d done since The Road Back. Certainly there was no love lost between James Whale and the Germans – he’d been a prisoner in a German POW camp for two years during World War I and more recently he’d had the indignity of the Nazis effectively censored The Road Back, a film which could have been a masterpiece if the Nazis hadn’t butted in and Universal (fearful of losing foreign revenues not only in Germany but Brazil and China, countries with which Germany had reciprocal trade treaties) hadn’t caved. The opening scenes of They Dare Not Love promise a great movie, and though the promise isn’t quite fulfilled it’s still an estimable film and quite a bit better than its reputation. The film’s biggest problem is its preposterous central character, Prince Kurt von Rotenberg (George Brent), whom we’re supposed to believe is a descendant of Austria’s hereditary royal family (which one?) and a figure of such towering authority and stature he could personally lead a revolution against Austria’s new occupiers and millions of Austrians would flock to his cause and make the Nazis’ rule impossible.

So they’re out to get him at all costs, and he and his household staff are planning to escape to Czechoslovakia – only the Prince, irrepressible ninny that he is, first wants to stop at an old Viennese café because he hears their band playing a Johann Strauss, Jr. waltz. At the café he meets Marta Keller (Martha Scott), an old childhood girlfriend but one he’d abandoned because she’s a commoner and therefore, you guessed it, they dared not love. Instead she’s become engaged to another guy, who runs into her at the café, recognizes the prince and turns out to be a Nazi spy who calls the Gestapo on him. The Germans raid the club and Kurt and Marta barely get away in time, then end up together on an ocean liner bound for America. Only Kurt has an American fiancée, Barbara Murdock (Kay Linaker), and rather than confront the Other Woman Marta sneaks away and Kurt and Barbara have a fling that seems to consist mostly of attending horse races and other opportunities for gambling. Fortunately, Barbara realizes that Kurt is neglecting his responsibilities to go home and lead the anti-Nazi resistance, and she sends him away. Kurt and Marta end up together on an ocean liner they think is a Belgian ship taking them to a conveniently neutral country, only unbeknownst to them just before the ship sails the German government buys it and installs their own crew to sail it to Hamburg, where Kurt will be arrested for his crimes against the Reich.

Fortunately, the captain (Egon Brecher) turns out to be an old-school German who’s afraid to confront the Nazis directly for fear they’ll go after his family in Germany, but he’s willing to marry Kurt and Marta on his own authority (and without the humiliating Nazi ritual of asking both of them to certify they are of “pure Aryan blood,” a necessity under Nazi law) even though that gets him accused of fraternizing with the enemy by the harder-line Nazis on his crew, who make it clear that they’re keeping him alive for the present because they need his skills as a navigator, but once they dock in Hamburg … Eventually a deus ex machina arrives in the form of a British destroyer which, seeing a ship flying the Nazi flag just as World War II has been declared (the captain got a message that the war nad started but no one else on board knew that), starts firing on it and demands that the Germans allow the British crew to board it and take everyone on board prisoner. Needless to say, Kurt and Marta are overjoyed to be rescued by representatives of a country on the right side of the struggle against fascism – much to the surprise of the typical comic-relief British doofus who formally takes custody of them – and the film ends with Kurt and Marta daring to love at last.

They Dare Not Love is a film that marks the end of James Whale’s career – he would make only one other film, a 30-minute short called Hello Out There (more on that later) in 1949 – but also a dry run for all the movies the U.S. would make about romance and intrigue against the backdrop of World War II. In some ways They Dare Not Love is a sort of beta version of Casablanca, with Kurt as a combination Rick Blaine and Victor Laszlo and Marta as his Ilsa Lund, both trying to maneuver their emotional needs with their shared commitment to the fight against fascism. If They Dare Not Love doesn’t blend the elements of romance, intrigue and heroic resistance as well as Casablanca, well, what film did? One sees They Dare Not Love as one of Hollywood’s first gropings towards an approach to the war that would dramatize the Nazi evil without outright scenes of violence and without showing the actual war, and which would counterpoint romance and intrigue in ways that would hold the audience’s interest.

It’s also a movie that is full of characters with ambiguous loyalties; given how much imposture is one of Whale’s running themes as a director, he must have been gratified to work on a story in which so many characters are not what they seem – including Paul Lukas, who like Vajda had worked with Whale in his glory days (as the client in The Kiss Before the Mirror) and who manages to keep both the lead characters and us off balance as to whether he’ll turn out to be a Nazi or an anti-Nazi. Part of the problem with They Dare Not Love is the cast; according to Bette Davis, George Brent was drop-dead gorgeous in persion and virtually every woman who worked with him (including Davis herself) had the hots for him – but on screen he comes off as no more than ordinarily attractive (the opposite of doomed icons like Rudolph Valentino and Marilyn Monroe, both of whom – according to people who knew them – were no more than ordinarily attractive in the flesh but came off as sex gods on film), and he never could act for beans. Martha Scott is professionally competent but little more – imagine this film with Bogart and Bergman in the leads and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s wrong with it as it stands! Still, They Dare Not Love is a lot better than its reputation, and it deserves a full restoration and re-evaluation not only as James Whale’s last feature but an early landmark in the U.S. depiction of World War II on film.

Hello Out There (Huntington Hartford Productions, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The final film in our re-evaluation of the James Whale canon was the only filmmaking work he did in the last 15 years of his life: Hello Out There, produced under really quirky auspices and a film shrouded in mystery and misinformation. Before reading the latest edition of James Curtis’s biography of James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, I had been under the impression that it was made for the KTLA Channel 5 L.A.-based TV station, shot in their studios and totally lost and unknown. It was actually produced by Huntington Hartford, an independently wealthy man who basically ran through his entire fortune subsidizing various art projects. He dabbled in commercial filmmaking – probably his most famous film, and certainly the easiest one to obtain since it fell into the public domain relatively quickly, is the 1948 Abbott and Costello film Africa Screams – and he bankrolled this film intending it to be released as part of a feature. In 1948 a British studio had released a compilation film called Quartet, based on four stories by W. Somerset Maugham, and it was such a big hit worldwide that they followed it up with Trio, and other studios started greenlighting features that were essentially compilations of shorts based on short stories, sometimes by the same author and sometimes with some sort of thematic connection.

Hello Out There began as a short play by William Saroyan, who judging from our recent viewing of James Cagney’s (as star and producer) film of Saroyan’s The Times of Their Lives, spent his whole life trying to be Eugene O’Neill and not quite making it. Hello Out There takes place in the rural small town of Matador, Texas, where a man identified in the imdb.com cast list only as “The Young Gambler” (Henry Morgan) has been incarcerated in a prison cell whose bars are installed at such offbeat angles to each other it looks like he’s being held in The Jail of Dr. Caligari. We eventually learn that he’s in jail for assaulting a woman – his defense is that she came up to him in a bar, started walking with him, offered to take him up to her place but then demanded money for doing so, and when he found she was a prostitute he angrily rejected her – and he was arrested when her husband sneaked up behind him with a lead pipe and knocked him out. Now he’s been taken to a jail in another town but the husband has not only followed him there, he’s organized a lynch mob and intends to kill him without any of those bothersome ideas like due process and a fair trial.

He calls out, “Hello out there?,” and he’s answered by Ethel Smith (Marjorie Steele, then Mrs. Huntington Hartford) – the imdb.com page lists her character’s name as “Emily” but “Ethel” is what is clearly heard on the soundtrack, though she’s clearly not the Hit Parade organist of that name. She’s just turned 17 (making her “of age” under Texas law) and she’s instantly attracted to the prisoner. He pleads with her to help him escape before the lynch mob comes to get him, and she tries but is unable to – it’s after hours, all the doors at the jail are locked, and she goes home to grab her father’s gun but can’t find it. The pair are clearly two lost souls – she works for the jail as a cook and gets 50¢ a meal, and got the job because her father runs the place – they talk a lot about running off together and settling in San Francisco (a place she’s romanticized even though she’s never been there) – who instantly fall in love and are obviously meant for each other, but of course their romance is not to be. The husband (Ray Teal) arrives with his wife (Lee Patrick from The Maltese Falcon) and leaves the lynch mob outside the jail so he can dispatch the hapless prisoner who first tried to pick up his wife and then insulted him further by calling her a whore. He shoots the prisoner just as Ethel arrives back at the jail after her unsuccessful attempt to get him her dad’s gun.

Hello Out There is a film that works stunningly despite some big flaws – notably Saroyan’s sometimes convincing but sometimes overwrought dialogue, a one-note performance by Henry Morgan (fans of his Col. Potter on the M*A*S*H TV show are going to be startled not only by how much younger he looks here but how relentlessly he overacts) and Marjorie Steele’s virtual incompetence (she makes Marion Davies look like Katharine Hepburn by comparison) – mainly because of Whale’s staging. In addition to directing, he designed that amazing set and did the lighting himself, and despite the limitations of the cast he had to work with (let’s face it, the actors at the time who would have been “right” for the male lead, Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, would both have been way beyond Huntington Hartford’s budget) Hello Out There emerges as quite effective theatre and yet another intriguing indication of a Road Not Taken in Whale’s career.

According to Curtis, Whale had husbanded his money well enough he didn’t have to work again – though he would occasionally direct a play either in the U.S. or on one of his periodic trips to Britain – and he also had his mid-life crisis in his 60’s instead of his 40’s, breaking up with his long-time partner David Lewis (whose career had, ironically, been destroyed by a debacle of a flop, Arch of Triumph, based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque – the same author whose The Road Back had been equally disastrous for Whale’s own career – and whose final break with Whale came about because he was so busy rehabilitating his own career he turned down Whale’s desire for the two to go on vacation together), picking up a boy-toy named Pierre Foegel in France, bringing him back to the U.S. and then when that relationship went sour installing a swimming pool in his backyard, using it as a lure to invite attractive young men but apparently, like Andy Warhol in his “Factory” days, getting off (in both senses) more from watching them cruise each other than going after them himself. He eventually drowned in that swimming pool – it was ruled an accident but it was really suicide, though that wasn’t known until the note he wrote to David Lewis was revealed after Lewis’s own death in 1985 – and, with typical bad Whale timing, he offed himself just six months before Universal released their old horror films to TV on a package called Shock Theatre and film buffs once again began talking about James Whale.

Roll Up Your Sleeves (NBC-TV, Walgreens, aired April 18, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve been waiting for the chance to comment on two star-studded TV shows I watched Sunday night, the 56th annual Academy of Country Music awards on CBS and a hour-long show on NBC that preceded it: Roll Up Your Sleeves, an infomercial to promote the vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. The most bizarre thing about Roll Up Your Sleeves is that anyone, including NBC and the principal corporate sponsor, Walgreens, thought it was necessary to promote the vaccine in this way. You would think that anyone faced with a pandemic that has been deranging normal human life for over a year now would grab the chance to do something that would, if not eliminate the COVID-19 threat, at least alleviate it and make it manageable. You’d be wrong. There’s a fascinating article in the April 20 Los Angeles Times by Robb Willer and Jay Van Ravel, “How to Convince Republicans to Get Vaccinated” (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-04-20/vaccine-hesitancy-covid-republicans-political-polarization), that points out how politically polarized everything about COVID-19 has become, including the vaccine.

According to these authors, 44 percent of Republicans have told pollsters that they don’t intend to get the show, while 92 percent of Democrats either have already got the vaccine or definitely plan to. The authors suggest that the only way to erode Republicans’ unwillingness to get vaccinated is to enlist Repubican spokespeople to advocate it – and the producers of Roll Up Your Sleeves scored exactly one major Republican, former President George W. Bush. Instead the show was far more focused on getting people of color in general and African-Americans in particular. The three co-hosts – Michelle Obama, Ciera and her husband, Russell Wilson – were all Black, and among the major voices promoting the vaccine to African-Americans were former President Barack Obama in a segment with basketball stars Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley. Barack Obama made one good point in referencing the understandable skepticism of African-Americans towards major medical interventions by the federal government – the grim history that has ranged from the Mengele-like experiments done on Black subjects during slavery to the infamous Tuskegee Experiment of 1932, in which African-American men who had contracted syphilis were denied the treatments that then existed so doctors could study the “natural” untreated course of the disease. (Then again, given that the standard treatments for syphilis at the time were compounds of mercury and arsenic, which were only replaced by penicillin after World War II, the government and the researchers might have been unwittingly doing those Black men a favor.)

Obama pointed out that the Tuskegee Experiment involved withholding care and treatment from Black people, while the vaccine campaign involves offering Black people (and Americans in general) a potentially life-saving treatment against a deadly virus. The show also featured at least two African-American church congregations in which the ministers have taken an active role in getting their congregants vaccinated. The show spiraled on through various guest stars – frankly I had thought this would be a musical show with variety acts performing their hits and attracting people to the vaccine message, but even people like Ciara who are known for singing just talked instead. After Michelle Obama’s introduction the show began with a segment between actor Matthew McConaughey and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who for some reason has been hailed not only as a great infectious disease expert despite how thoroughly he screwed up the AIDS response and even called “The Sexiest Man Alive.” They also dragged in NASCAR champion driver Duke Jarrett and actress Eva Longoria, along with current President Joe Biden, ending with the 72-year-old comedian Billy Crystal, who closed the show with a charming anecdote of his grandchildren. I hope the show encourages people to get vaccinated (I’ve already had both shots of the Moderna vaccine in February) but it’s a sad commentary on the craziness that has surrounded this issue from the get-go that anyone thought they needed to make this show!

Wives Under Suspicion (Universal, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I picked up the next two items in the James Whale filmography, which we’ve been working through in chronological order: Wives Under Suspicion and The Man in the Iron Mask. Wives Under Suspicion was James Whale’s final film under the contract he had signed with Universal in 1933 when he was at the height of his critical and commercial success and the father-and-son team of Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. still controlled the studio. Whale’s standing at the studio collapsed when his massive production of the musical Show Boat in 1936 was the final straw that broke the back of the Laemmles’ Universal; as Whale overran his budget and schedule, the Laemmles had to go hat-in-hand to hedge-fund owner J. Cheever Cowdin for the money to finish it and keep the studio afloat. The deal allowed Cowdin and his hedge fund to take over Universal in a forced sale if the Laemmles couldn’t pay back the loan on time, which they didn’t – though, ironically, when it was finally released under the new regime Cowdin installed Show Boat was a blockbuster hit.

Whale’s next film, an adaptation of Erich Marka Remarque’s The Road Back – his post-war sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front – again ran over budget and schedule and was further sabotaged by Universal’s new production chief, Charles Rogers, who caved in to pressure from the Nazi German government to take out most of the film’s anti-militaristic content (though what’s left is a flawed but still powerful drama that’s particularly good at dramatizing the returning veterans’ struggle with what now would be called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD). Whale was also Gay, and as open about it as you could be in 1937, which hadn’t bothered the Laemmles (Whale biographer James Curtis claims that one reason he often used British actors was not only that he felt more at home with them culturally, being British himself, but also that they didn’t care that he was Gay – their attitude was, “A lot of theatre people are Gay. Who cares?” – while U.S. actors were more likely to be homophobic and express disgust at working for a Gay director.

Wives Under Suspicion was a remake of Whale’s 1933 courtroom melodrama The Kiss Before the Mirror (adding Whale to the list of directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra and William Wyler, who remade their own movies), in which a defense attorney in early-1930’s Vienna (played by Frank Morgan, who’s best known today for the title role in The Wizard of Oz, whose performance in quite a different role will dumbfound Wizard fans) defends an old friend (Paul Lukas) who shot his wife and killed her when he realized she was having an affair. The original title came because he realized she was cheating on him when he saw her primping before her elaborate set of bedroom mirrors, and when he kissed her she reared back in revulsion and accused him of spoiling her makeup. This let him know that she was making herself up for another man, not him. The attorney then finds out that his own wife is stepping out on him similarly, and he hatches a plot to kill her after he wins his case and therefore establishes legal justification for such an action.

Wives Under Suspicion was scripted by Myles Connolly from the original Austrian play by Ladislas Fodor, and Connolly made one intriguing change in the premise: in his version the attorney (Warren William) is a prosecutor, a district attorney who has an abacus-like rack of 35 miniature skulls in his office that represent the master criminals of his city (Connolly reset the story in the United States but didn’t specify what American city it takes place in) whom he’s prosecuting one by one. The latest scalp in his collection is Joseph Patterson (Matty Fain), who gets convicted and executed in the opening scenes – which have an intriguing and ironic parallel to Frankenstein: a series of elaborate electrical gadgets in which a human body is plugged, this time not to bring it to life but to kill it. This time the murderer Jim Stowell (Warren William) is prosecuting is Shaw MacAllen (Ralph Morgan, brother of Frank Morgan, star of the original The Kiss Before the Mirror), a hapless guy from a well-to-do family who became a political science professor and got disowned by his family for marrying a lower-class woman who turned out to be a “manizer” as well. Shaw finally caught his wife when he kissed her as she primped before the mirror and she reared back with revulsion, though this time around Ralph Morgan merely narrates this in a confession William has recorded – Whale didn’t get to show this action on screen in a flashback as he had in 1933.

William locks the record in a safe in his home and says he won’t reveal it at trial unless the defense pleads insanity, which they do – a goof because if court procedure were the same in 1938 as it is now, the prosecution would be legally obligated to share all the evidence they had with the defense, and if the D.A. tried to pull the stunt William plans in the film, the recorded confession would almost certainly be ruled inadmissible and the D.A. would risk having the judge declare a mistrial. The premise of the film is that Stowell has been ignoring his wife Lucy (Gail Patrick), forgetting her birthday (though his long-suffering secretary “Sharpy,” played by a woman named Cecil Cunningham in what’s clearly the voice-of-reason role in this film, remembers it and sends Lucy a pair of earrings in Jim’s name) and constantly breaking dinner dates with her to work on ine case after another. Given how much strongly the Production Code was being enforced in 1938 than it was in 1933, Connolly had to fudge some important plot points, including making Lucy completely innocent of any intention to have an affair. The man she’s suspected of having the affair with is Phil (William Lundigan), but Lucy is only seeing him because he’s dating her best friend Elizabeth (Constance Moore) and she’s trying to get Elizabeth to marry him despite her uncertainty, mostly about his job prospects because he’s a graduate student in college and Elizabeth is worried about his job prospects after he finishes. (To add to the irony, Connolly made Phil one of Professor MacManus’s students.)

Eventually Jim stalks Lucy and Phil and aims a gun at her when the two are together, though he doesn’t shoot. Instead he destroys MacManus’s recorded confession and agrees to plead the charge down from murder to manslaughter, and he and Lucy eventually end up taking their long-delayed vacation even though a big case is breaking as they leave. From the opening credits to William’s presence in the cast list and a big but dramatically irrelevant scene in which Patterson’s cousin returns from Mexico to gun Jim Stowell down, Wives Under Suspicion looks like a Warner Bros. production in exile – indeed, it’s closer to the usual Warners style than the film Whale actually made there, The Great Garrick – and there’s virtually nothing of Whale’s style in the movie. There are some interesting camera compositions (the cinematographer is George Robinson, who shot some of the best Universal horror movies in the post-Laemmle “New Universal” era as well as some of the studio’s best films noir) that suggest that had Whale been able to keep his career going (as it turned out, it petered out after just two more features, the last of which Whale wasn’t allowed to finish), he might have become a very interesting noir director. Whale’s visual flair, his knowledge of the expressionistic “German style” of cinematography and set design, and his love of moral ambiguity and fascination with characters who are literally not what they seem (as a Gay working-class Englishman who had reinvented himself as a faux aristocrat, Whale was clearly drawn to stories about imposture) should have enabled him to make a comeback in the film noir era.

Thie Man in the Iron Mask (Edward Small Productions, United Artists, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Instead Whale followed up Wives Under Suspicion with The Man in the Iron Mask. a moderate-budget swashbuckler based upon Twenty Years After, the third novel in Alexandre Dumas père’s cycle of novels about the Three Musketeers and their involvements in various political conspiracies set in and around the royal court in 17th Century France. The film was produced by Edward Small, who made a specialty of Dumas adaptations starting with the 1934 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring British actor Robert Donat in his only U.S.-made film (after that he high-tailed it back home and even when he signed with the U.S. studio MGM it was with a proviso that all his films for them must be made at MGM’s British studio), and his obsession continued with the 1947 Black Magic (based on Dumas’ Memoirs of a Physician and starring Orson Welles as Caglistro – though Gregory Ratoff was credited as director Welles actually ghost-directed the film and probably had a hand in writing it as well).

Twenty Years After had previously been filmed by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. as a sequel to his own version of The Three Musketeers, and given that it was finished in 1929 and was a silent Fairbanks decided to add a spoken prologue in which he as D’Artagnan would address the audience directly and tell them what they were about to see. (When the film was reissued in the 1950’s the original soundtrack couldn’t be found, so Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. voice-doubled for his late father.) James Curtis reports in his Whale biography that making The Man in the Iron Mask was an unhappy experience for him – even though the film was a commercial success (the last one Whale had) – because Small extensively micromanaged him throughout the shoot. The plot of The Man in the Iron Mask posits that in the early 17th century King Louis XIII of France sires twin sons, and the courtiers immediately decide that they can’t allow two rival claimants to the throne once the boys grow up. They try to get King Louis to kill his younger (by minutes!) son, only he refuses.

Instead he sends D’Artagnan (Warren Willam, in his second film in a row for Whale and a much less challenging characterization than his role in Wives Under Suspicion) home to his native province of Gascony, deeds him a large estate and exempts it from taxation, and bids D’Artagnan to raise the king’s younger son, Philippe, as his own. Then 20 years pass and the brothers grow up: Louis XIV formally assumes the throne at age five (this really happened, by the way) and by the time he reaches adulthood he’s a nasty little nerd who owes more to Caligula or Nero than even the most abusive kings in France’s actual history. He executes people just for the hell of it and invites his mistress, Mademoiselle de la Vallière (Marian Martin), to the royal palace to “service” him any time he wants. He also jacks up the tax rates on the people to pay for his luxurious lifestyle and gets the French peasants so riled up against him it briefly looks like they’re going to start the Revolution over a century early. Louis orders his guards to seize the D'Artagnan household and get them to pay the taxes his dad permanently exempted them from, and eventually Louis learns that there is a young man in his likeness who’s an exact double of him.

Louis Hayward plays both roles, and intriguingly he’s quite a lot better as the evil Louis than the good Philippe; as the bad guy he orders executions and tortures with an off-handed routineness that remains chilling today and no doubt was even more horrifying to audiences in 1939, when Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were all still alive and at the peaks of their powers. (Quite a few 1939 movies feature historical villains audiences were clearly meant to compare to the real-life dictators of the time.) The bulk of the film consists of the plots the Musketeers, and Louis’ good advisor, Colbert (Walter Kingsford), to abduct and kill Louis and put Philippe on the throne, and the efforts of Louis and his corrupt advisor, Fouquet (Joseph Schildkraut) to keep that from happening. At one point Louis arrests Philippe and forces him to wear a head-covering mask and hood of iron, which he expects will kill him in a few weeks because, unable to shave under it, Philippe will be choked to death by his own beard. Only Colbert and the Musketeers get Louis’ queen, Maria Theresa of Austria and Spain (Joan Bennett), to steal the key to the mask from around Louis’ neck after he gets drunk one night and passes out in the royal bed (it’s clear by then that Maria Therese loves nice-guy Philippe and hates bad-guy Louis). Colbert and the Musketeers are able to rescue Philippe, get the mask off him and put it on Louis, but the king escapes and gives chase in a carriage; eventually the king’s men kill the Musketeers but Louis dies when his carriage overturns and falls down a chasm (an ironic reworking of the death of Kemp in Whale’s The Invisible Man) and Philippe assumes the throne and presumably will reign the remaining 50 years or so of the real Louis XIV’s tenure under Louis’ identity.

Though one of Whale’s favorite themes – imposture – is at the center of this story, The Man in the Iron Mask has few of Whale’s stylistic elements and seems to come alive only in the scenes set in the dungeons of the Bastille. Here, among the flotsam and jetsam of Louis’ political dictatorship and the people incarcerated (or forced to work there as guards, which seems almost as unpleasant), Whale is in his element, humanizing the dehumanized monsters these people have become though their imprisonment. Aside from those genuinely chilling scenes – and the look of the iron mask itself, which resembles some of the early rejected designs for the Frankenstein monster when they were planning to make him look robotic instead of human – The Man in the Iron Mask is a quite entertaining movie but also a rather routine one, though at least the scenes in which Louis Hayward’s characters share the screen are reasonably convincing and the swordfights (choreographed by champion fencer Fred Cavens, who also coached Errol Flynn in his big historical spectacles) are exciting and fun to watch.

Envy: A “Seven Deadly Sins” Story (T. D. Jakes Enterprises, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Envy, the second film in their Seven Deadly Sins heptalogy based on the “inspirational” writings of Victoria Christopher Murray, who according to her Web site has won an NAACP Image Award and is working on a series of books based on each of the seven deadly sins, though so far she’s only written Lust, Envy, Greed and Wrath. Stripped of its “inspirational” trappings and the heavy-duty religiosity that implies, Envy is a pretty typical Lifetime script about the mysterious stranger who comes to the family fold, all sweetness and light on the surface but secretly hiding deep, dark-secret plans to steal their money, their lovers, their kids or in this case all three. While Lust was about two half-brothers fighting over the same woman, Envy is about two women fighting over the same man. Gabrielle Wilson-Flores (Kandi Burruss) seemingly has it all: a successful public-relations firm in Atlanta, a hot, sexy husband named Mauricio Flores (D.C. Young Fly – from a stage name like that I thought he would be a rapper, but he isn’t: his imdb.com page lists him as an actor and writer) and a charming daughter named Betty (Angeline Friedlander). She;’s also got an inheritance coming from her father, who just retired after starting a successful trucking business – he worked himself up from one truck he drove himself as an independent to a fleet, and now he’s about to retire with his wife and take it easy over how many days he has left.

The opening prologue shows the half-sister Gabrielle doesn’t know she has, Keisha Jones (played in the prologue as a child by Selah Kimbro Jones and as a young adult by Rose Rollins), whose dying mother gives her a copy of the Bible that contains a letter mom wrote to Keisha’s father, Elijah Wilson, who sired her after Gabrielle through an affair he had with Keisha’s mom. He had sent her away with money for an abortion, but mom double-crossed Elijah, gave birth to Keisha and ducked all her questions about just who her dad was. When Keisha came home from school one day, she asked her mom about something her teacher had said in class that everyone has both a mother and a father, and mom replied, “She’s right. Everyone has both a mother and father … except you.” When mom dies in hospital, the staff gives Keisha her Bible, which contains a letter mom drafted to Elijah but never sent him explaining that she’d gone ahead and had his child anyway. Keisha learns from the letter that her dad is Elijah Wilson and he’s a successful truck-company owner in Atlanta (by no coincidence also the setting for Lust – and at least one character from Lust, the minister who raised the earlier film’s protagonist as her grandfather after both her parents were killed in a car crash when she was eight, reappears here and gives a sermon about, you guessed it, envy).

She looks him up on the Web and finds that he’s just retired but his daughter Gabrielle is a successful co-owner of a public-relations firm with a business partner named Regan (Serayah), and their main client is a rapper named Justus whom Gabrielle briefly dated before she married Mauricio instead. Working with an unseen boyfriend back home whom we never see – we only hear him and Keisha talking on the phone – Keisha determines not only to loot as much money as possible from Gabrielle’s company but to take over her entire life: dethroning her from her role in the company, seducing Mauricio away from her and taking their daughter as hers. Lifetime has done innumerable variations on this plot before, including (as here) a paternity test Gabrielle secretly commissions to determine whether Keisha is really her biological sister or not – the test confirms she is – and with that information, as well as Elijah’s enthusiastic support for Keisha’s claim (he says the only way he can atone for his guilt over having sired her out of wedlock in the first place and then driven her mom away and tried to keep her from being born at all is to admit Keisha as part of his family and give her an equal share of his fortune), Keisha joins the P.R. firm. At first Regan is so suspicious of the newcomer she gives Keisha a desk with a phone but no computer (does this company actually still use a receptionist in 2021 instead of subjecting all callers to the mean, evil, harsh regime of voicemail? If so, more power to them!) and sends her out to get coffee while she and Gabrielle pitch their new marketing plan to Justus. Ironically, the plan – that he launch his new line of shoes by signing 12 pair and hiding them around Atlanta, inviting people to join them in a modern-day scavenger hunt – was suggested by Keisha herself, and she’s naturally put out that she’s barred from the meeting at which her idea is being presented.

Meanwhile Keisha, who’s living in Gabrielle’s and Mauricio’s home, has hacked Gabrielle’s laptop and is embezzling from her bank accounts – though that plot point is raised almost in passing and it’s clear Murray and whoever adapted her book for this TV-movie (its imdb.com page credits Damon Lee as director but doesn’t give any writing credits, not even Murray’s) couldn’t be less interested in such a comparatively tawdry crime as grand theft. Instead Keisha gets a more baroque form of revenge by leaking to a celebrity reporter that Justus is really the father of Gabrielle’s daughter Betty (ya remember Betty?). The reporter crashes the reception at which Justus’s shoe scavenger hunt is being announced and asks about it. Mauricio, who already started to get jealous when he found out that Justus provided the seed capital for Gabrielle to start her business (she’d told him it came from her partner Regan’s well-to-do parents), punches Justus out at the event and then announces that he’s leaving Gabrielle for her (nonexistent) infidelity. Keisha then hacks Gabrielle’s laptop again and sends an e-mail in Gabrielle’s name saying that because the scandal surrounding her has made her name toxic in the P.R. business she’s handing all her accounts to Keisha. Keisha also makes a move on Mauricio, which he virtuously refuses, and when Regan catches on to Keisha’s game and does some online research on her ne’er-do-well background she goes to Gabrielle’s house to confront Keisha. The two women confront each other on Gabrielle’s giant curved staircase, and just when we’re thinking, “Regan! Don’t let yourself get caught on top of a staircase with a Lifetime villainess!,” she lets herself get caught on top of a staircase with a Lifetime villainess and said villainess pushes her down the stairs. Director Lee shoots the scene ambiguously enough that we’re not sure whether Keisha pushed her deliberately or Regan just lost her footing in the struggle, and unlike most of the heroines’ African-American best friends who learn the truth about the villain, Regan survives.

Keisha’s last attack on her half-sister is to kidnap Betty, but Gabrielle, her husband and the cops (yes, this takes place in a never-neverland America in which the cops actually help Black people instead of shooting them) track Keisha down and recover Betty. The cops arrest Keisha (presumably for her financial crimes since everything else she’s done, however immoral, seems at least legal) but Gabrielle and her father Elijah insist that whatever she’s done or tried to do to them, she’s still family and they’re going to stand behind her. Frankly, I’d rather see a typical Lifetime movie in which the villainess is an unmitigated killer (though I like Christine Conradt’s knack for giving her evil characters understandable motives) rather than this softer incarnation of one. LIke Lust, this film even ends with a Bible verse (a denunciation of envy from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians), affirming Murray’s “inspirational” message and her willingness, rare in a Lifetime writer, to forgive the bad girl for her sins. But however nice that is from the standpoint of humanity, it weakens the story as drama – and it also deprives us of the soft-core porn that has made a lot of Lifetime movies entertaining even if their plots were so melodramatic they were just silly!