Galentine’s Day Nightmare (N.B. Thrilling Films 8, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Alas, the next movie, Galentine’s Day Nightmare, was pretty much a return to Lifetime’s usual form, though it has its moments. Like How I Met Your Murderer, Galentine’s Day Nightmare was both written and directed by women – Roxanne Boisvert and Andrea Canning, respectively (Boisvert is a new name for me but Canning is a familiar writer in the stable of Pierre David and Tom Berry, the producers), but they don’t acquit themselves nearly as well as their counterparts in How I Met Your Murderer. Never heard of “Galentine’s Day” before? Neither had I, though apparently it means the day before Valentine’s Day, when a group of professional women go out on a ladies’-night date together. This particular “Galentine’s Day” happens in Philadelphia and features the staff of the Quickpulse Sportswear company, which has just been acquired by female entrepreneur Margaret Coleman (Karen Cliche, an almost too appropriate a name for a Lifetime actress!).

The protagonist is Claire Donahue (Camille Stopps), and on Galentine’s Day at the Café Bistro 215 she meets and is instantly attracted to a hot Black guy named Brian (Anthony Grant). Since he’s a sexy guy in a Lifetime movie, we instantly know he’s up to no good, and so it turns out: while he’s at Claire’s place he wakes up in the middle of the night, hacks her computer and smartphone to install spyware on them, and takes pictures of her credit cards with his own phone. Exactly what he’s up to isn’t apparent at first, but Claire realizes she’s stepped in it big-time when she shows up for work the next day – and Brian turns up at the Quickpulse Sportswear office and introduces himself as Margaret Coleman’s husband (and also the owner – not just a waiter or bartender – at Café Bistro 215). . Claire and Brian meet up again at a park where they both like to jog (information Claire let slip to him on their big night together) and he seems all lovey-dovey – a park ranger named Dale sees them together and assumes they’re boyfriend and girlfriend – and Brian assures Claire that he and Margaret are divorcing and therefore he will soon be available.

Only Brian, who continually eavesdrops on Claire because he’s bugged her computer and her phone and therefore knows exactly where she’s going to be and with whom, stages a couple of public scenes in which he accuses her of stalking him. Then Brian confronts his wife Margaret in a stairwell at the Quickpulse offices and stabs her to death with a letter opener he stole from the Quickpulse mailroom, so Claire’s fingerprints are on it. The whole point of Brian’s seduction of Claire, we soon realize, is to make it look like Claire became so infatuated with Brian that she offed his wife to eliminate the competition. Brian even goes so far as to plant a tracking device on his own car, one he purchased with a counterfeit credit card made from his photo of Claire’s real one, so it will be traced to her. Though writer Canning has made clear that Brian is the bad guy from scene one, she does throw a surprise twist up her sleeve when she makes Tiffany Adler (Tina Jung), Claire’s best friend at work and someone she’s relying on for help, turn out to be Brian’s secret confederate, a woman he’d known in Atlanta and befriended (and probably more) then – though given that Brian already drove his first wife to suicide (if he didn’t actually kill her himself) and murdered his second wife, both because they were rich women and he wanted their money, Tiffany is rather ill-advised if her ambition is to become the third Mrs. Brian Coleman.

One particularly interesting aspect of Canning’s script is how much of it is motivated by adultery and divorce: one reason Brian selects Ciaire as his victim to frame is that previously she accidentally killed her boyfriend while they were having an argument over, you guessed it, his alleged affair; and Claire’s parents, Hannah (Susan Hamann) and Mark (David Lafountaine), broke up over Mark’s infidelities, and there are a couple of fascinating scenes in Brian talks to a photo of his parents and says the reason he’s targeting women was out of revenge for the way his mom took his dad to the cleaners financially during their bitter divorce. (This is a good movie if you believe that there’s something fundamentally silly about one human being expecting another never to have sex with anyone else for the rest of their lives.) Fortunately both Hannah (imdb.com lists her as “Anna” but I’m sure “Hannah” is what I heard the actors say) and Mark are still around, still in town and properly supportive of their daughter in her Kafka-esque predicament, and Mark, a former software engineer, figures out how to get Brian’s spyware programs off of Claire’s computer and phone.

There’s also a fascinating antagonism between the two women cops assigned to Margaret Coleman’s murder: white cop Kim Sanders (Kate Fenton) falls completely for Brian’s frame and is convinced Claire did it, but her Black partner, Kim Bailey (Lisa Michelle Cornelius, a powerful actress who deserves a TV series of her own), is suspicious. Between Bailey and the Black woman lawyer, Sophie (JaNae Armogan), Claire hires to represent her, the cops finally become convinced that Brian is the killer, and Tiffany rats him out for a lighter sentence and thus gives them the evidence they need to arrest him. Galentine’s Day Nightmare gets better as it progresses and Claire ends up in the Kafka-esque (or Hitchcockian) dilemma faced by many a previous innocent hero or heroine forced to flee the cops and stay at large until they can uncover the real killer – and Anthony Grant makes Brian a multidimensional character instead of just one of Lifetime’s standard drop-dead gorgeous villains. He also deserves a career boost from this film!

Revenge Delivered (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Lifetime showed another “premiere” movie on Saturday, May 1 with the almost risible title Revenge Delivered. The title might have seemed to indicate a delivery driver who was really a psychopath out to get revenge on various customers along his or her route for whatever grievances, real or imagined, Lifetime’s writer de jour could come up with for them – had Christine Conradt written a script on that theme she’d probably have called it The Perfect Amazon Driver, but the agenda this film’s actual writer, Jason Robinson, had was quite different. The film opens with a prologue set in 1995 in which a 20-something Black woman obstetrician/gynecologist, Dr. Victoria Brooks (Olunike Adeliyi), is faced with a crisis involving a young white woman’s troubled birth. With the baby’s shoulders too big to fit through the birth canal, Dr. Brooks wants to abandon natural childbirth and do a C-section instead – but she lets it go too late and she’s faced with the dilemma of which person to save: the mother or the baby. Mom says through her pain that she’d rather her child be born even if that means her own death, and so mom dies and the baby lives – and then we get a closeup of the baby’s father, who is not surprisingly angry that his wife died and now he’s going to be stuck raising his daughter as a single father.

The film then flashes forward to 2020, and Dr. Victoria Brooks is so well regarded St. John’s, the hospital where she works, is giving her an award for excellence – but she’s still haunted by the mother she had to let die 25 years earlier. The memories come flooding back when she arranges to mentor three young women who want to go into ob/gyn themselves – especially since one of them is Brooks’ own daughter Noelle (Mary Antonini). Victoria is ultra-critical of her daughter and watches her every move both in the hospital and at home – she’s graduated from medical school but her mom still insists that she live with Victoria and her husband (Noelle’s father – Robinson throws us a line to make sure we get that he’s in fact her biological father, not a stepfather) Thomas (Jefferson Brown), a white guy who restores 1950’s British sports cars and pursues that as a hobby while his wife is the breadwinner. (Kudos to the film’s casting director for finding an actress to play Noelle who looks credible as the offspring of a white father and a Black mother.) Then various untoward things start happening around the hospital and Victoria’s practice there. First someone sets her computer printer to spew out page after page on which the words are repeated, “Remember what happened on … ,” whatever the date was when Victoria had to let the mother die to save her child. Then someone throws a rock through the window of her car, and wrapped around the rock is a message, “Next time I’ll throw something bigger than a rock.”

Victoria quickly realizes that there are only three people close enough to her to be doing these things, the people she’s supposed to be training: her daughter Noelle; Claire Matthews (Samantha Brown), a white woman with long blonde hair who reaches out to Noelle and offers her support against her overbearing mother; and Luna Alvarez (Tamara Almeida), who’s carefully built up by writer Robinson as a red herring because she has a flame tattoo similar to that of the father (though it’s on her back instead of her arm). But any hardened Lifetime movie-watcher can almost instantly guess it’s Claire who’s Dr. Brooks’ torturer, and as her crimes escalate she goes all-out to disgrace Dr. Brooks and force her out of her job. The culmination of her scheme comes when she sneaks morphine into the IV of a woman about to give birth in Dr. Brooks’ operation, while at the same time stealing all the drugs that would ordinarily be used to counteract it. Dr. Brooks manages to get hold of naloxone and bring the woman back from the brink, so both she and her newborn baby enter the world alive and reasonably healthy – but she is brought up on charges by the hospital administration and the head of the hospital tells Dr. Brooks he’s going to suspend her medical license at least “temporarily” until the hospital completes its investigation. (I’m sure this is a mistake in the script; an individual hospital administrator can suspend a particular doctor’s privilege to practice at that hospital but he couldn’t suspend her license altogether. All he could do if he wanted that to happen is to recommend it to the state medical board, which would have final say over whether she could keep her license.) By the time Victoria realizes that Claire is her tormentor, it’s nearly too late: Noelle has gone off for a weekend camping in the mountains with Claire, only Claire knocks Noelle out and ties her up, then when mom shows up binds and gags her and finally explains her plan both to the Brookses and to us.

It seems that Claire’s dad never stopped tormenting her, blaming her for the death of her mother and constantly harassing her and doing everything he could to make her life totally miserable and give her guilt feelings about being alive when her mom was dead. Robinson’s writing and William Corcoran’s direction, which until this final scene have been nothing special, suddenly acquire weight and power as Claire pours out her history, culminating in her murdering her father after his psychological and physical abuse got to be too much – she stabbed her dad with a kitchen knife and then somehow was able to fake the scene so it looked like he died in a car crash (and since he had a history of alcoholism and DUI the cops are all too ready to believe that), then she went to medical school determined to become and ob/gyn and train with Victoria just to destroy her. Eventually Victoria’s husband (who was delayed because before she left Claire slashed all four tires of his car) figures out where they are (it helps that Victoria had kept a GPS tracker on her daughter’s cell phone and is thus able to find out where she is) and leads the police, led by detective Andy Garcia (Antonio Sobretodo, Jr. – though despite the Hispanic names of both character and actor he frankly looked more Asian to me), to the scene, where they rescue Victoria and Noelle and, thanks to Noelle being able to wriggle free from her bonds and club Claire with a large stick, knocking her out long enough – the police arrest Claire and take her into custody instead of either them or one of the Brookses killing her. Aside from its quirky title, Revenge Delivered has little to recommend it other than a powerful reading of Claire’s final speech by Samantha Brown (indeed, her whole performance is quite effective, portraying her deliberation as well as her madness and avoiding the annoying perkiness a lot of Lifetime villainesses have manifested in their attempts to seem “normal”); otherwise it’s a fairly typical Lifetime movie, albeit with two Black protagonists and, once again, an interracial marriage and the mixed-race person it’s produced treated on screen as if they’re no big deal.

Soul (Walt Disney Studios, Pixar Animation, 2020)

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

The film we screened last night was Soul, a co-production of Walt Disney Studios and its Pixar subsidiary, which has been ballyhooed a great deal and called ‘a love letter to jazz,” which it really isn’t – though its central character, Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx in something of a comedown after having played Ray Charles!), is an aspiring jazz musician who’s reached middle age and is still living with his mother (a successful tailor). He’s played short and ill-paying gigs as a musician and has carved out a niche as a middle-school band teacher, where he rehearses the students in “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” (a 1941 hit for Duke Ellington but actually written by Duke’s son Mercer – that was the year the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers unilaterally raised the fees to license their music to radio stations, and rather than pay the new fees the radio networks and stations formed their own licensing company, Broadcast Music, Inc. This meant music by ASCAP members like Duke Ellington couldn’t be played on the radio, so Duke had to get new material from people who weren’t ASCAP members, like his son Mercer and his recently hired arranger and lyricist, Billy Strayhorn).

The kids are playing it terribly (the movie even opened with a similarly terrible student performance – or what purports to be one – of Disney’s theme song, “When You Wish Upon a Star” from the 1940 film Pinocchio) except for one 12-year-old girl, Connie (Cora Champommier), who’s a whiz on trombone and the only member of the band who really gives a damn about music. Joe is having a crisis of conscience because the school district has offered to hire him as a full-time band teacher, and naturally his mom wants him to take it – but just then Joe’s old friend Curley (Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson) gets a line that a Black woman saxophonist, Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) needs a fill-in piano player for her gig that night at the Half Note nightclub. (One wonders if the film’s writers – Mike Jones, Pete Docter and Kenny Powell, the last two of whom also directed – were thinking of the jazz world’s greatest woman instrumental musician, Mary Lou Williams.) It’s the sort of major gig Joe has been waiting for all his life, the one that might enable him to make a name for himself in the jazz world and not have to do anything but play full-time, and to signal his excitement at the prospect he runs through the streets of New York City. Alas, he is nearly run down by cars several times and ends up falling through an open manhole.

At that moment Soul pretty much stops being a movie about jazz and instead becomes a clever and charming but also pretty familiar Disney version of the afterlife. The basic premise comes from two fine films from the 1940’s, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), in which the carefully curated counts of who’s admitted to the world beyond death get screwed up, either by someone dying when they’re not supposed to or being missed when they were supposed to be collected. Joe ends up in a department of the afterlife in which the souls awaiting placement in bodies (and who look for the most part like baby-like blobs) are paired with genuinely dead mentors to prepare them for insertion into bodies on Earth, where they will have normal lives and then return to the world beyond. The officials in charge of this process are depicted as curved lines made to look like sketches by Picasso – an artist I don’t think Disney animators ever used as a model when Walt Disney was still alive. Joe gets paired up with Soul 22 (Tina Fey), who’s been so unpleasant that potential mentors ranging from Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa to Marie Antoinette have washed their hands of her. She’s bratty, salty-mouthed (or at least as salty-mouthed as you’re allowed to be in Disney animation, which is not very) and hates the whole idea of having to live on such an offensively boring planet as Earth. But if she can earn the medallion that enables her to transport to Earth, she can give it to Joe – who desperately wants to return, undo his premature death and play that jazz gig that will presumably make him a star.

Eventually the two of them make it to Earth, courtesy of an astral sailing ship captained by Moonwind (Graham Norton), who also has an earthly incarnation as a sign spinner on a street corner in New York. Only things get mixed up: 22’s soul ends up in Joe’s body while Joe’s soul ends up inside a cat the hospital maintains to comfort patients. The two of them go on a chase through the streets of New York looking for Moonwind to start the process to change their souls back to the “right” bodies – a gimmick that reminded Charles of the 1984 comedy All of Me, in which Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin switched bodies – and the scenes of the two walking around New York, doing typical New Yorky things like taking an uncomfortable ride in the subway (at one point Joe, or 22 in Joe’s body, picks up a soda from under a subway seat and starts drinking it, and the real Joe in cat drag knocks it out of his hand because he knows how dangerous it is just to pick up someone else’s drink off a subway) and getting Joe’;s hair cut by a Black barber Joe knew in his real incarnation. Midway through all this Joe’s suit tears and he has either to get it fixed by his tailor mom (referencing a film we’d watched earlier this week, Dr. Broadway, I joked, “It could be worse – his tailor could be a crook!”) or get another – and his mom, who hates the idea of him playing a jazz gig because his dad, also a jazz musician, spent his whole life playing ultra-low-paying jazz jobs while mom’s tailoring business supported them, nonetheless loans him his dad’s old suit.

Also along the way they meet up with Connie, who says she wants to give up playing because everyone ridicules her for it, but Joe – or 22 in Joe’s body, or something – talks her out of it. Eventually Joe finally gets in his right body, plays the gig with Dorothea Williams and looks like he’s headed on his way to jazz stardom at long last – only instead he has second thoughts and the movie ends surprisingly ambiguously, with Joe still undecided whether to play jazz or take that full-time teaching gig, though it’s a happy ending for 22, whose sojourn on Earth in Joe’s body has convinced her she wants a normal life on Earth after all. I had thought where this was leading was that Joe would take the middle-school gig, not because he wanted the regular pay, health insurance and overall security of it, but because he’s realized through his encounter with Connie, as well as his mentor relationship with 22, that his real purpose in life isn’t being a jazz musician himself but mentoring the next generation of them and thus keeping the jazz tradition alive. I was a bit disappointed in Soul because I had expected it to be more of a movie about jazz than it was – there’s nothing in the basic story that requires the central character to be a jazz musician and not a classical composer, a writer, a painter or any other sort of creative artist frustrated by the difficulty of making a living as such – though I found it charming, clever and quite entertaining.

I must admit I really don’t like the look of computer animation that much – those chunky, blocky figures really don’t have either the realism of live action or the flexibility and artistry of traditional drawn animation – but it’s become the modern-day standard (of the five films nominated for Best Animated Feature, which Soul won, only one of them was drawn instead of computerized) and, despite my overall distaste for the look, I’ve certainly enjoyed films that were done with computerized animation if the story and characters otherwise appealed to me. Soul also won for Best Original Score; the award went to Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails), Atticus Ross and Jon Batiste, though the actual credits on the film split their roles, with Reznor and Ross getting credit for the overall score (including the synthesized burbles that are the main accompaniment for the scenes set in the afterworld) and Batiste specifically credited for the jazz arrangements, and also (in a separate credit) for supplying Joe Gardner’s piano playing. (Reznor and Ross also got a separate nomination for the film Mank – the latest attempt to rewrite the history of Citizen Kane and give the credit for that film’s greatness to hack writer Herman Mankiewicz instead of genius director Orson Welles. It’s nice to know that Reznor, like Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, has been able to become a film composer after having started out with a rock band; indeed, by now Elfman is far more known for his movie work than his band.) Overall I have an oddly mixed reaction to Soul: I’m disappointed that it wasn’t the movie I was expecting (Clint Eastwood’s biopic of Charlie Parker, Bird, remains the best film ever made about jazz) but I was still entertained and at times even moved by the film it is.

The House of Fear (Universal, 1939)

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

Over the last week Charles and I have been exploring a number of “B” movies from the early 1940’s, three of them from grey-label DVD’s and one from an above-ground source. After watching Paul Leni’s 1929 thriller The Last Warning – originally released as a part-talkie with synchronized music and sound effects, but presented in Universal’s DVD and Blu-Ray reissue as a silent with a newly composed score – I wanted to revisit The House of Fear, Universal’s 1939 remake with William Gargan as Arthur McHugh, who reopens an old theatre one year after it closed when the star of the play it was performing fell dead in the middle of the show on opening night. The story began life as a novel actually called The House of Fear by Wadsworth Camp, published in 1915; it was then adapted into a play called The Last Warning by Thomas Fallon, which got purchased by Universal and directed by German expatriate Leni (whose last film it was; he died at age 44 of blood poisoning from an abscessed tooth just after finishing it) from a committee-written script (Alfred A. Cohn, J. G. Hawks, Robert F. Hill and Tom Reed).

The 1939 House of Fear had only one screenwriter, Peter Milne, and he made one change in the story that I think improved it. In the Leni film McHugh was just an opportunistic producer seeking to make a quick buck by buying the theatre where the mysterious death occurred, putting on the same play with all the surviving cast members, and promoting that he was staging the play in defiance of the ghost of the dead actor that was supposedly haunting the theatre. In The House of Fear, McHugh is actually a police detective who’s working the original murder as a cold case and hits on the idea of reopening the theatre and staging the same play, Dangerous Currents, with the surviving cast as a means of solving the original crime. As its title suggests, Dangerous Currents is a play about radio – particularly about an egomaniac broadcaster who insists on dredging up a 20-year-old murder case and thereby potentially ruining the lives of the victim’s surviving relatives, much like the 1931 Five Star Final – and the opening sequence shows the murder occurring during the climactic broadcasting scene in an attempt to fool any audience member who remembered the original movie (including Charles and I, who had seen the recent Blu-Ray re-release of The Last Warning recently) that they had updated it to be about a murder taking place in a radio studio during a broadcast instead of in a theatre during a play. Then the camera pulls back to reveal that it was just a play about radio.

Overall, the two films track pretty closely plot-wise, including the identities and motives of the murderers, but I found myself liking The House of Fear considerably better than The Last Warning, if only because dialogue made it quite a bit easier to follow the convoluted plot. Ironically, The House of Fear, like The Last Warning, was directed by a German expatriate, Joe May, who had been a major “name” in German cinema in the early 1920’s – he’d owned his own production company and regularly made vehicles for his wife, actress Mia May – only he fled Germany for the U.S. when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and never had that big a career in this country. After this movie he would make The Invisible Man Returns (1940) – noteworthy for being Vincent Price’s first horror film and for a class-conscious and anti-capitalist script by Hollywood Communist Lester Cole, but otherwise hardly at the level of James Whale’s masterly original from 1933 – and an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, also from 1940. He later quit the movie business to open a restaurant in Hollywood, but at least according to what I’ve read it was a failure because May, living up to the stereotyped German, told his customers what they should order instead of letting them decide for themselves.

May copies some of Leni’s effects from the earlier film, including having the killer scramble up and down the stage’s rafters à la The Phantom of the Opera (1925) – a film that clearly influenced both versions – but for the most part it’s a surprisingly unatmospheric film for a movie made by a German director from the Weimar era. Still, it’s quite an enjoyable movie and has some unexpected twists and turns – and the antagonism between Gargan’s detective character and his boss at the police department, who’s fretting over how much of the department’s money he’s spending on his production, is well done and one of the most entertaining elements of the film. And if there wasn’t already enough confusion over the various titles of this story and the films, in 1945 Universal recycled the name The House of Fear for one of the later Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies, though its plot (set in an old dark house and nominally based on the Conan Doyle story “The Five Orange Pips”) has nothing to do with this one, but if you’re looking for a grey-label copy of either movie you have to be very careful in ordering to make sure you get the one you want.

Behind the Eight Ball (Universal, 1942)

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

After showing Charles The House of Fear I thought of running Behind the Eight Ball (notice there’s no hyphen in the title), a 1942 Universal vehicle for the Ritz Brothers, the three-person comedy team who had fled 20th Century-Fox after they resented being cast in a rehash of an old-dark-house mystery called The Gorilla. They settled with the studio, made one more film there at the end of the 1930’s (Pack Up Your Troubles, an uncredited remake of Laurel and Hardy’s 1932 film of the same title, with the boys trying to find the surviving relatives of a girl left orphaned by World War I) and then decamped to Universal for a semi-respectable musical called Argentine Nights, an obvious knock-off of 20th Century-Fox’s Down Argentine Way (though Argentine Nights was actually released six weeks earlier) but still a reasonably budgeted and entertaining movie. In 1942 the Ritz Brothers returned to Universal and shot three back-to-back “B” movies, each only an hour long: Behind the Eight Ball, Hi’ya Chum and Never a Dull Moment. “It is difficult to see what the Ritz Brothers and Universal saw in each other at this time,” historian Leonard Maltin wrote in his book Movie Comedy Teams. “On the Ritzes’ part, they had rebelled at Fox because of the ‘B’ pictures they were doing, yet the type of ‘B’ Universal offered them made the minor Fox efforts look like colossal endeavors. As for Universal, they already had two comedy teams under contract – Abbott and Costello, and Olsen and Johnson – and why they needed a third is a mystery.” Behind the Eight Ball – which Charles and I were watching on a grey-label source taped off the air from WQTV, Channel 68, in Boston, the same source as our copy of Hi’ya Chum, though since then I’ve been able to trace an official release from the Universal Vault Series – is usually considered the best of the three.

We had watched a previous copy that had glitched to a stop after the first 3 ½ minutes, but from it I had got the impression this was essentially a third version, a comedy remake, of The Last Warning/The House of Fear. The only real similarity is that in a revue called Fun for All being staged at a remote New England theatre on the sort of dark and stormy night that in Universal movies is more often associated with the creation of the Frankenstein monster, the featured guest star is killed. The producer, Joan Barry (Carol Bruce), sends for another featured guest star to perform the next night – and he, too, is killed in the middle of the show. Not surprisingly, she’s having a good deal of trouble recruiting anyone to take the place of the dead performers – while the Ritz Brothers are working as waiters in a fancy nightclub and keep looking for the chance to perform. They do, but get fired, so they end up taking the job with Joan Barry even though their predecessors have been killed.

We’ve seen a homeless-looking man outside the theatre skulking around in the rain during each murder, and for about the first half-hour the movie is mostly centered around romantic intrigues between the cast members interspersed with some surprisingly good and well-done swing dance numbers to songs by Don Raye and Gene DePaul. The cast also features a big band led by Sonny Dunham, who had spent the 1930’s as a featured trumpet player with Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra. In the early 1940’s he left Gray and went out on his own, obviously noticing how successful Harry James’ band had been and deciding to emulate it. (The one other film appearance I’ve seen of Dunham is a three-minute “Soundie” – a short film meant to be played in a “Panoram,” a sort of video jukebox – in which he and his female vocalist play Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark,” one of James’s biggest hits.) Behind the Eight Ball was directed by former Keystone Kop Eddie Cline, who by the early 1940’s had risen to direct W. C. Fields in The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, two acknowledged comedy classics, from a script by Stanley Roberts and Mel Ronson called Off the Beaten Track (which might well have been a better title for the film). The best-known of the Raye-DePaul songs is a novelty called “Mr. Five-by-Five,” based on the nickname for Count Basie’s blues singer Jimmy Rushing, who was so short and stout that, as the song suggests, “He don’t measure no more from head to toe/Than he do from side to side.” (In 1958, as a guest vocalist with Benny Goodman’s band at the Brussels World’s Fair, Rushing himself would sing “Mr. Five-by-Five.”) While the best version by far of “Mr. Five-by-Five” was the hit record by singer Ella Mae Morse with Freddie Slack and his band – released the same year as the film, 1942 – Carol Bruce’s rendition in the film is quite serviceable, and she and Dick Foran make a nice and unoppressive romantic couple.

Raye and DePaul also give the Ritz Brothers one of their most genuinely funny comic songs, a spoof of the Charles Atlas “I was a 97-pound weakling” ads which ends with one of the Ritzes ostensibly lifting the other two, one in each hand. “They’re really on wires,” he jokes, and so they turn out to be as the number fades out with two Ritzes seemingly hanging in mid-air. The film gets more interesting as it progresses and it takes on a topical connection to World War II: the good guys discover a short-wave radio set and realize that the reason the theatre’s performers have been killed is to drive the whole troupe away so the Nazi spies can radio U.S. military secrets to their bosses in Berlin. But who is the killer? It turns out to be Danny (Johnny Downs), an anti-social and attitude-heavy clarinetist in Dunham’s band (though Dunham tells the other characters he’s not a regular member of his group and got hired only for this gig) who’s rigged a gun inside his clarinet that will fire every time the player hits high C. As for the homeless guy – a red herring if there ever was one! – he turns out to be a dancer hoping for a slot in Barry’s show, though Charles was expecting him to be a government agent staking out the place to catch the spies. Behind the Eight Ball is hardly a great movie, but it’s a lot of fun and blessedly ends straightforwardly without the sort of trick gag that ended Hi’ya Chum (which Laurel and Hardy could get away with but the Ritz Brothers couldn’t).

Dr. Broadway (Paramount, 1942)

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

The next night Charles and I once again watched a couple of early-1940’s “B” movies, though this time they were both thrillers. One was Dr. Broadway, a 1942 Paramount production starring MacDonald Carey as Dr. Timothy Kane, whom the tabloids have nicknamed “Dr. Broadway” because he has a lot of patients in the theatre district, many of them raffish Damon Runyon-style characters who provide much of this film’s entertainment value. I’d long wanted to see this movie because of a spectacular still shown in William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film, in which Dr. Kane and a blonde woman who turns out to be named Connie Madigan (Jean Phillips) are hanging out – literally – on the ledge of a tall hotel. Supposedly she’s threatening to commit suicide – “I want to go out of this world!” she yells to the inevitable crowd of both police, media people and ordinary spectators that gathers below – and won’t listen to anyone try to talk her out of it. Dr. Kane manages to get her off the ledge and back into her hotel room, where it turns out she was just doing this as a publicity stunt for a nightclub in Harlem featuring a band that is supposedly “out of this world!” (Later Peggy Lee would record a quite engaging novelty song called “Show Me the Way to Get Out of This World [Because That’s Where Everything Is].”)

The police threaten to arrest Connie for all the money they spent responding to her phony suicide threat, but Dr. Kane goes to night court with her and talks the judge out of it by telling him Connie is a decent girl who took that job rather than do something more immoral and Production Code-unmentionable. The judge fines her $250, which she doesn’t have, but Dr. Kane offers to pay for it – only he doesn’t have to because he did a free appendectomy for the judge’s aunt, which he will bill her for if the judge insists on receiving Connie’s fine. Dr. Broadway was directed quite effectively by the young Anthony Mann from a screenplay by Art Arthur based on a story by Boden Chase – who was mostly a Western writer whose best-known credit was for Howard Hawks’ Red River, not exactly a name you’d associate with a raffish comedy-thriller set in New York City. The main intrigue begins when Dr. Kane learns that a convict named Vic Telli (Eduardo Ciannelli, though with his first name Anglicized to “Edward) who was convicted in the first place because of Dr. Kane’s testimony has just got out of prison early and is gunning for the Good Doctor. Actually Vic is terminally ill – he was diagnosed with cancer while in prison and he only has about a month to live – and what he wants Dr. Kane to do for him is withdraw $100,000 out of a safe deposit box and turn it over to Telli’s estranged daughter, Margie Dove – whom he hasn’t seen since he and Margie’s mom broke up over 15 years before.

Only, as you might expect, Vic Telli is murdered by other gangsters out to hijack the $100,000 – one other gangster in particular, Jack Venner (J. Carrol Naish), who runs a seemingly successful tailor shop as the front for his various rackets. (It’s rare in a movie, especially one of this vintage, for the gangster’s front business actually to be thriving on its own.) One of Venner’s thugs tries to mug Dr. Kane for the money (it seemed to be in a package way too small to contain $100,000 – a particular pet peeve of Charles’s, who knows just how bulky money really is, though he reasoned that maybe in 1942 $100 and even $500 bills may have been in relatively common circulation) – only Kane gets it back. The next attempt to steal it from him comes from a hard-edged woman who claims to be Margie Dove (Joan Woodbury, a first-rate actress who probably was kept from the stardom that was her due by an oddly bony face; she was the star of the PRC film Paper Bullets, a.k.a. Gangs, Inc., playing a morally ambiguous woman who’s the key to busting a crime ring, though the actor who got the career boost from it was Alan Ladd as an undercover agent). Woodbury is in only one scene, but it’s one of the film’s high points, as she first seems sincerely uninterested in her dad’s money, then agrees to take it, then drops enough hints that we and Dr. Kane both begin to suspect she’s an impostor. (Charles read the above and pointed out a detail in the script that gives her away: Vic Telli recalled that the last tine he saw his daughter he was holding her hand as her tonsils were removed, but Dr. Kane gave a throat examination to the fake “Margie” and noticed she still had tonsils.)

Venner’s last attempt to steal the money is to kidnap Connie Madigan, who after their run-in on the ledge went to work for Dr. Kane as his receptionist (ya remember receptionists? I hope the man who invented voicemail is in a circle of hell as bad or worse than Hitler’s!). The bad guys kidnap Connie and demand that Dr. Kale bring the money – earlier there was a supposed payoff but Kane substituted worthless paper for the bills, and the Tailor from Hell stamped the back of each one with his logo and sent them back. Kane leads the police to the gang’s hideout but it’s once again on a top-floor room in a hotel, and this time Connie is too scared to make it across the ledge to the room and safety once the cops have captured the gang, So Kane has to talk her back across the ledge and into his arms. Dr. Broadway is an odd movie, on the cusp between the light-hearted comedy-thrillers that were the norm for crime films in the late 1930’s (inspired largely by the smash success of Woody Van Dyke’s 1934 The Thin Man, based on a Dashiell Hammett novel) and the new, tougher style later known as film noir that was inspired by John Huston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon, another Hammett adaptation.

Anthony Mann would later become known for his noirs (the little-known 1945 The Great Flamarion as well as better-known films like Desperate and Railroaded) and still later for his Westerns (though his first major Western, Winchester .73, was basically a film noir in Western drag), but he was already quite accomplished when he made this, which was apparently his first feature film for theatres (previously he’d directed two experimental TV movies in 1939 for the 100 or so TV sets in existence in the U.S. that could receive NBC’s pilot-program telecasts). MacDonald Carey is an acceptable leading man (though the role really demanded a Cagney or Bogart), Jean Phillips an engaging ingénue and Joan Woodbury scorches the screen in her one scene. The cinematographer is yet another German expat, Theodor Sparkühl (though as he worked in the U.S. his first name would acquire a second “e” at the end and his last name would lose its umlaut), who would later shoot some of Paramount’s most significant noirs and here he’s clearly trying to get as many of those dark, “German” compositions into a story that veers back and forth between the worlds of Runyon and Hammett. Dr. Broadway is actually a quite engaging film, and I’m wondering if there were any plans at Paramount to use it to launch a series with the “Dr. Broadway” character that got sidetracked by the U.S. involvement in World War II and the changes in the film business that followed the war: the demise of the “B” picture, the advent of television, the antitrust decisions that severed the studios from their theatre chains (Ronald Reagan blamed the collapse of his career on the divestment, which is one reason why when Reagan became President antitrust enforcement virtually stopped altogether) and the tougher approach to crime films that became standard for the first decade after the end of the war.

The Falcon’s Brother (RKO, 1942)

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

After Dr. Broadway I ran Charles The Falcon’s Brother, fourth in RKO’s Falcon series of detective films with George Sanders playing the title character, whose true name was Gaylord “Gay” Lawrence. This actually began as an RKO series featuring Leslie Charteris’s good-bad character The Saint, which Sanders had begun playing in 1939 and continued for two more years until Charteris abruptly pulled the rights to the Saint character. No problem: RKO simply bought the rights to a novel by Michael Arlen called The Gay Falcon and filmed it with George Sanders, essentially just changing the name of the character from the Saint to the Falcon. Only by 1942 Sanders was getting bored with the character by either name, and he asked RKO to let him out of the series. The ingenious solution RKO’s staff, particularly producer Maurice Geraghty, came up with was to cast George Sanders’ real-life brother, Tom Conway (he had changed his last name because he wanted to make his own career and not capitalize on Sanders’ success), as Tom Lawrence, the Falcon’s brother.

Geraghty assigned two mystery pulp writers, Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice, to concoct a script in which Gay would be incapacitated for most of the movie, Tom would take over for him, and at the end Gay would die a noble, self-sacrificing death so Sanders could relinquish the role and Conway could take it over for good (or at least for the nine remaining films in the series). What Rice, Palmer and director Stanley Logan came up with was a film that starts on a ship coming to New York from Cuba; Gay Lawrence is waiting at the dock to meet the brother he hasn’t seen in years, but is told that his brother has been murdered aboard ship. Of course it’s a case of mistaken identity, and Tom Lawrence turns up very much alive. The two team up to solve the original killing and find that the murders revolved around a fashion magazine owned and edited by spoiled rich kid Paul Harrington (James Newell), who’s engaged to couturier Arlette (Charlotte Wynters), but she’s getting restive about the relationship and suspects he might be a bit “off.” When one of her models, Diana Medford (Gwili André), also turns up murdered, Arlette edges away from Harrington – though even she doesn’t suspect how evil he really is.

It turns out Harrington is a contact for a German sabotage ring, using the cover of his magazine to send Axis agents coded messages about the upcoming battles of the war, like the cover featuring a model in a bathing suit with a sash reading “Honolulu” and blocks reading “12” and “7” – which the two Falcon brothers finally realize was a code letting the Nazis in on the secret that their Japanese allies were about to bomb Pearl Harbor on that date. The good guys figure out the riddle of the cover of the latest issue and realize it’s a signal for an assassination plot against a Central American diplomat who’s key to keeping Central and South America either out of the war altogether or, preferably, on the Allied side. (This was a major foreign-policy aim of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, mainly because Germany and her allies needed valuable war materials like platinum they could have got from Latin America if the U.S. hadn’t done a major diplomatic outreach, the Good Neighbor Policy, to keep those countries on our side.) The Central American diplomat is being flown in on a seaplane (a lot of RKO movies featured seaplanes, a relic of the days when Merian Cooper had been both RKO’s chief of production and a board member of Pan American Airways, which in addition to servicing U.S. travelers going to Latin America also operated the famous China Clipper – and many of their flights were on seaplanes), only a whole bunch of Germans have occupied the resort near the bay where the plane is to land. A sniper prepares to take a shot at the diplomat and Gay Lawrence is too late to stop the shooter, but not too late to throw himself into the path of the bullet, thereby sacrificing his own life for Anglo-American security.

Though it’s a bit disappointing that we see so few scenes of the Lawrence brothers actually working the case together, The Falcon’s Brother is a well-done film, given topicality by the war-related plot and with a nice stereotype-tweaking performance by Keye Luke as Gay Lawrence’s Asian houseboy, who speaks perfect English but frequently puts on a pidgin accent to callers the Falcon wants to put off and not have to deal with. The Falcon’s Brother is an estimable film and a good transition for a series that managed to maintain a high level of quality by “B” detective standards, including at least two subsequent films that were of special interest: The Falcon in Mexico, about an artist who fakes his own death to boost the value of his paintings and then gets killed by real, which uses stock shots from Orson Welles’ unfinished documentary It’s All True; and The Falcon in Hollywood, which uses the basic situation of Mel Brooks’ The Producers – an unscrupulous and crooked producer decides to make a deliberately bad movie, get several times the production budget out of his investors and abscond with the rest – for a serious crime film.