Law and Order: Special Victims Unit/Law and Order: Organized Crime (Universal, Dick Wolf Productions, NBC-TV, aired 5/13/21)

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

At 9 p.m. last night I watched the latest “crossover event” between Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime, which in practice meant the latest attempt by Dick Wolf and his production staff at a shotgun marriage between his two shows that will give Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni scenes together … just like in the old days. Only it’s not like the old days because Meloni has become a lot more worn-looking (he’s still sexy but he’s not that sexy anymore) and the writers of his new show began it by killing off his wife in a car-bomb explosion and that has changed his character to make him more bitter and angry. The eloquent acting we used to get from him – the thin edge the old version of Elliott Stabler walked on when you never were quite sure of when and how he would blow – isn’t something he’s being given a chance to do in these scripts. I still think he should have followed up his 12-year stint on SVU with a movie career as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, a character that could have been written for him – but the producers of the Reacher movies and Child himself went with crappy little Tom Cruise instead. (Child told the Los Angeles Times that he signed on to Cruise’s casting because he was flattered that the world’s biggest movie star would be playing his character; apparently he didn’t stop to think that the pint-sized Cruise would be all wrong as the overpoweringly tall Reacher, and we know Child intended Reacher to be tall because over and over again he describes him as literally towering over the other people he meets, which Meloni could have done and Cruise couldn’t, just as Leonardo di Caprio – a much better actor than Cruise, by the way – couldn’t duplicate the effect people who actually knew Howard Hughes described as him being so tall he loomed over them.)

The SVU episode would actually have been a good one if it hadn’t been shoehorned into the arbitrary linkage with Organized Crime: it dealt with a gang of three female prostitutes – one white, one Black and one Asian – who target rich men, give them drugged drinks, tie them to beds, force them to reveal their PIN’s and security codes so they can extract their bankrolls, and then leave them – only they’ve acquired a “bad batch” of their drug of choice, the so-called “Purple Magic” blend of oxycodone and Fentanyl, that leaves their victims dead. The tie-in with the Organized Crime show is that “Purple Magic” is a recognized brand name in the drug underground for the product produced by Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott), the Moriarty-like boss of all New York organized crime (he was originally the son of a mafioso named Sinatra – of all things – but he changed his name to something Anglo and built a huge conglomerate to launder his organized-crime income into legitimate-seeming businesses), only unauthorized dealers are faking the stuff, using too much Fentanyl and adding MDMA to the formula to produce the lethal variety. He determines to put the illegal cookers and dealers out of business, and since he’s not exactly in a position to enforce intellectual property rights against them, he simply has them massacred by one of his many hit squads – this one composed of killers who disguise themselves as cops. T

he show also takes a couple of detours – it turns out that Olivia Benson’s scapegrace brother Simon was one of the early victims of the Three Killer Hookers (though at his time they were still just using oxycodone and heroin), which gives her and Stabler a parallel (both are investigating the killings of family members in violation of all the policies about conflicts of interest); and also there’s a riff on the George Floyd killing as a young Black man whos studying to play guitar and be the next Django Reinhardt gets attacked by police and his hand is stepped on until his bones break and presumably this destroys his potential talent. The writers make it more ironic that he’s the nephew of Stabler’s Black commanding officer’s Lesbian partner. Later in the Organized Crime episode Stabler nearly has sex with Angela Wheatley (Tamara Taylor – of course I joked about her forming a musical group with Tamara Tunie and Tenille Townes: T&T&T&T&T&T!), only he draws back at the last minute – and it’s a good thing, too, because at the end of the episode it’s revealed that not only was Kathy Stabler, not her husband, the intended target of the car bomber in the opening episode, it was Angela Wheatley, not her husband, who took out the hit on her. That was the cliffhanger of this episode, which will apparently continue next week (I’ve noted in these pages that I can’t stand serial shows and one of the things I liked about the previous incarnations of Law and Order was that they generally wrapped up their stories in a single hour-long episode – they would occasionally do a two- or three-parter but they didn’t get into this damnable serialization, where if you miss one episode you lose the ability to follow the story unless you pay for yet another “streaming” service so you can catch up), and apparently the next episode will feature Richey Wheatley, son of Richard and Angela, getting more and more mixed up in daddy’s business.

Ladies of the Jury (RKO, 1932)

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

Last night at 9 p.m. I turned on Turner Classic Movies for a 1932 film that had an intriguing title, Ladies of the Jury – which turned out to be a minor gem, a courtroom comedy starring Edna May Oliver as Mrs. Livingston Baldwin Crane, a Social Register type who ends up on the jury in a murder case against Yvette Gordon (Jill Esmond, who was briefly Laurence Olivier’s first wife before she left him for a female lover with whom she stayed for decades; in one of the greatest near-misses in movie history she was set to play the female lead in the 1932 film A Bill of Divorcement, only she and Olivier high-tailed it back to England just before the film went into production and producer David O. Selznick put a New England-born actress named Katharine Hepburn into it instead), a former Broadway chorus girl who is accused of murdering her much older sugar-daddy husband for his money. The judge in the case, Henry Fish (Robert McWade) is an old acquaintance of Mrs. Crane – a fact she keeps reminding him of throughout the trial, when she isn’t absent-mindedly grabbing his gavel. The prosecutor is a vicious monster named Halsey Van Styne (Alan Roscoe) – Mrs. Crane has never met him before but recognizes his last name because their ancestors fought together during the American Revolution – and the defense attorney is a hapless young man named Rutherford Dale (Morgan Galloway) who appears to be in puppy-love with the defendant – though the writers (John Frederick Ballard, original play; Marion Dix, “adaptation”; Salisbury Field, “dialogue”; and Eddie Welch, “additional dialogue”) blessedly don’t do much more than hint at that.

Instead they and the director, Lowell Sherman (he was both an actor and director and sometimes did both in the same movie; he wasn’t much of a director but his work here is unusually stylish for him) create delightful comic chaos as Mrs. Crane uses her rarely used right to question the witnesses directly … again and again. Midway through this 63-minute programmer the attorneys make their closing statements, the case goes to the jury … and the film suddenly turns into a prototype of Twelve Angry Men (though it’s interesting that a movie made just 12 years after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment has a gender-mixed jury where the 1950’s film was indeed just 12 angry men), as Mrs. Crane insists that Yvette is innocent while the other 11 are ready to convict her – and she persuades them much the way Henry Fonda did in the later film, by exposing the social prejudices that are leading them to convict the defendant whom she’s convinced is innocent. When Mrs. Crane reveals that one of the jurors is voting to convict just because he doesn’t like French people, she gets another juror to change sides because h is wife is a Frenchwoman he met while serving in World War I, and she also gets the vote of a chorus girl on the jury by getting another juror to admit that she’s prejudiced against chorus girls. The last holdout is Lily Pratt (Cora Witherspoon), who got on the jury just before Mrs. Crane did and showed up for court in a severe suit and a man’s tie and announced she was the head of a women’s “morality” group (much like the ones who would mobilize two years later and demand strict enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code and end the period of relative honesty in depicting sex often referred to as the “pre-Code” era).

In the end, she not only persuades the jury to acquit Yvette (who in her trial hadn’t made her cause any easier by constantly interrupting the court proceedings until Mrs. Crane told her to knock it off by addressing her in French; of course she and the defendant are the only two people in the courtroom who understand her!), she also uses the court bailiff to slip a note to her maid, ostensibly about dress patterns but actually a call to a private detective to investigate the man Mrs. Crane is convinced is the real culprit, Chauncey Gordon (Leyland Hodgson), nephew of the victim and the man wh oi’d inherit his fortune if his wife were convicted of the crime and executed for it. The key prosecution witness was Mrs. Gordon’s maid, Evelyn Snow (Helene Millard), who testified that Mrs. Gordon had shot her husband and then said, “What have I done?” Mrs. Gordon’s own testimony was that her husband had held a gun on her and tried to shoot her, only they both reached for the gun (this was made just six years after Chicago premiered on stage and famously used the “they both reached for the gun” gimmick) and the gun went off and killed him. Mrs. Crane insists that the jury be bused to the Gordon home, where she can see the table on which the gun was found – and when they reconstruct the crime the exhibit gun goes off and fires a bullet into a secret panel behind which Chauncey Gordon was hiding because he didn’t want anyone to know there was a connection between him and the maid (whom he had bribed to lie with the promise of a chunk of the Gordon fortune). The cops show up and arrest Chauncey and the maid, and the final “Not Guilty!” verdict is not shown but announced audibly over the RKO end title. Ladies of the Jury is one of those charming little films that got made during the studio system and give us old movie buffs real pleasure when they come to our attention; the big studios (and some of the small ones as well) turned these things out like clockwork in the 1930’s and 1940’s but sometimes they turned out a clock with really fine quality, as they did here.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Paramount, 1977)

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

I looked up last night’s schedule for Turner Classic Movies and decided to watch the film they were showing at 9 p.m. as part of a series of “Body Images on Film”: Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a 1977 Paramount production written and directed by Richard Brooks from a best-selling novel by Judith Rossner about a young woman, Teresa Dunn (Diane Keaton, in her first major role outside Woody Allen’s orbit), who’s a special-ed teacher dealing with deaf children by day and an habitué of singles bars by night who is eventually murdered in her apartment by one of her tricks. I remember reading Rossner’s novel in the 1970’s and watching the film around the same time, though I don’t recall under what auspices I first saw it. It wasn’t in a theatre, but I believe it was on a color TV at my mom’s apartment from a premium cable channel. I remembered very little about the movie except that it deviated from the book in an ill-advised way: Rossner began the novel with the murder and a brief sketch of who the killer was and what his motive was – he was a small-town kid who’d come to New York City, been picked up by a Gay man and more or less been forced into a sexual relationship with him, tried to pick up Teresa to show that he could get it up with a woman and therefore wasn’t “really” Gay, only he couldn’t and, in the novel’s most chilling scene (that was left out of the movie) after he can’t perform with her, he jacks off in her apartment and leaves his cum on her highly prized comforter. This freaks her out and she confronts him; he says, “I fucked you pretty good, didn’t I?” Sne snaps back, “You fucked yourself better,” and that sets him off on his murderous rage.

The film tells Teresa’s story in chronological order and doesn’t even hint at the murder until it occurs at the end – though probably most viewers in 1977 had either read Rossner’s novel or at least heard of it and therefore knew how the story ended and experienced Teresa’s story with the cloud of doom hanging over it that Rossner intended. I remember reading Lindsay Marracotta’s non-fiction book The Sad-Eyed Ladies about the late-1970’s straight singles bar scene and found it made it seem a lot more fun than either Rossner’s novel or Brooks’s film did. In some ways Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a film of its time – we hear a lot of the pop music of the period, mostly disco or soul (enough that the opening credits contain quite a few acknowledgments to the record labels that licensed it – it was still early in the expansion of movie credits and before that sort of information got relegated to the ending roll) and we see a lot of sorry-looking people hanging out at bars in the last stages of desperation. It’s also very much a pre-AIDS movie; not only do the people involved in the pickup lifestyle seem unworried about getting pregnant (though Teresa’s equally licentious sister Katherine, played by Tuesday Weld in the sort of dramatic departure from her previous dumb-blonde roles that virtually guaranteed her the Academy Award nomination she got for this part, does end up with a couple of babies from her shenanigans) and they don’t seem concerned about STD’s either. The one scene in the film that features a condom turns it into a joke – Teresa’s “nice” boyfriend James (played by William Atherton as a decent-looking but psychologically crippled nerd) brings one and she blows it like a balloon, jokes about it (“Who’s that supposed to protect – you or me?”) and insists that she’s never seen one before. (It’s all too easy to believe that!) And the film shows its age technologically as well; the phones are black dial units, permanently wried to a wall (in one scen of what passes for comic relief, Teresa almost misses a call when she accidentally drops her phone in her toilet), and in one of the scenes featuring a wild party hosted by Katherine and her husband de jour they watch porn … in black-and-white on a 16 mm projector.

Like the book, the film focuses on two of Teresa’s lust objects in particular: James, whom she meets when he’s a welfare worker whom she talks out of reporting the live-in boyfriend of one of her students’ mother, and Tony (played by the young Richard Gere when he was still the guy you called for the roles John Travolta turned down), a thoroughly obnoxious thug who has enough lock-picking skills he can let himself into Teresa’s apartment any time he likes and whose approaches on her verge on rape. In some ways Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a souvenir of the late-1970’s singles bar scene before AIDS and the fear around it virtually demolished it (singles bars made a comeback in the 1990’s as straight people realized it was not going to break out of the Queer community into the “general population” – only now they’ve pretty much died out again; even before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic many of them had closed because people interested in casual sex more often hook up online), but it also seems at times like a 1930’s movie. It’s a highly moralistic film that attempts to steer people away from the demi-monde by making the whole thing seem too boring to bother with, and Teresa’s murder at the end smacks too much of old-line “moral” propaganda that “the wages of sin is death.” It got attacked when it came out by Gay critics who resented that the killer was a self-hating Gay man, and it split the critical community wide open.

One gets the impression from Looking for Mr. Goodbar that there was a better film waiting to be made from this premise – the woman who leads a sexual and “moral” double life – and frankly that better film might well have been based on Anaïs Nin’s A Spy In the House of Love, in which the heroine is married but embarks on a series of casual but at least mid-term affairs with various men and manages to juggle her two identities. Nin’s story succeeded where Rossner’s novel and Brooks’s film failed in dramatizing the appeal and making both the sex and the danger from being “found out” believable; we identify with Nin’s heroine (or at least I did!) in ways I never quite warmed up to Teresa here. Besides, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a quite modern-seeming film in one respect: there’s no one in it we actually like. The key element in Teresa’s past that is supposed to explain what’s driving her is a bout with scoliosis, a congenital disease (though she’s been lied to and told it was the result of a childhood bout with polio) that required her to get corrective surgery to try to bend her back into a normal shape that wouldn’t put her in constant pain. At least according to her recollection (we have reason to doubt she’s telling the truth because Brooks occasionally cut in footage that looks like a real part of the story and later turns out to be Teresa’s fantasy), she had to wear a body cast as she recovered from this operation and she spent the recovery period in a bed in the living room, on full display to anyone who came over.

Teresa’s parents (Richard Kiley and Priscilla Pointer) are hard-core Catholics who routinely denounce birth control, abortion and the overall decline of morality, though she continues to live with them until a final confrontation when dad says, “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll live by my rules,” and she moves out. Her first affair is with a college English teacher whom she works for as an intern and who has a supercilious attitude. Like a lot of Teresa’s later lovers, he likes to finger the scar from her operation – much to Teresa’s irritation. On one of her prowls through the New York sexual underground Teresa gets drugs – first marijuana and then cocaine – and pretty soon she’s hooked; when one of her pickups gives her a Quaalude she oversleeps and is late for her teaching gig the next morning, and that blows the whole carefully built structure of trust she’d created with the kids in her class. (The young LeVar Burton appears as the older, hearing brother of a deaf Black girl in Teresa’s class.) There’s really no one in this movie you can identify with – not Teresa herself, not her bitch parents, not her crazy sister and not any of her, to use the term loosely, boyfriend. We just get a rather clinical picture of a young woman whose life is spiraling out of control, and Brooks couldn’t resist the old-Hollywood touch (he’d been working in films since the late 1940’s and had made his directorial debut in 1950) of having her swear off the singles-bar lifestyle and tell us that New Year’s 1977 (the film takes place mostly from New Year’s 1976 to New Year’s 1977, and we get such time clues as a Jimmy Carter for President commercial) is going to be her last night – when of course it becomes the night she is murdered by a trick. The idea that at least some critics in 1977 held up Teresa Dunn as a feminist heroine living her life her own way, unbound by moral conventions, seems incredible today; now she seems like the sort of movie character that makes you wish you could walk into the screen and talk some sense into her!

Never a Dull Moment (Universal, 1943)

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

Last night’s “feature” was Never a Dull Moment, third and last of the 60-minute “B” movies the Ritz Brothers made at Universal in 1942-43 in the last gasp of their filmmaking career. In his chapter on the Ritz Brothers in his book Movie Comedy Teams, Leonard Maltin wrote, “Whenever Hollywood decides to use this all-purpose title for a movie, it sems the film is duller than usual. In the Ritz Brothers’ case, their energetic antics kept the film from being dull, but at the same time they couldn’t keep the film from being anything but limp.” I had seen this and the first in the sequence, Behind the Eight Ball, decades ago in a KTLA Channel 5 showing in the wee hours of one morning in the early 1980’s and then never encountered them again until I bought grey-label DVD’s of them and the one in between, Hi’ya, Chum, and screened them with my husband Charles. I was pleasantly surprised by Never a Dull Moment, which on this go-round seemed to be in some respects the best of the three.

It helps that this one actually has a coherent storyline, courtesy of writers Stanley Roberts and Mel Ronson (who also wrote Behind the Eight Ball): a prestigious New York nightclub owner plans to host an engagement party for a wealthy dowager’s grandson, only he’s really a gangster and he’s planning to steal her famous and virtually priceless necklace, and to do this he hires a gang of out-of-town hitmen and gets the Ritz Brothers by mistake. I didn’t say it was a great plot line, but at least it made this film seem less like a revue and more like an actual movie. Universal also got the best supporting cast of the three films: George Zucco as the crooked club owner, Tony Rocco, playing a straight villain and bringing his usual authority to the role; the fine character actress Elizabeth Risdon as the dowager, Mrs. Schuyler Manning III (the sheer grandiloquence with which the other characters pronounce her name become one of the film’s funniest running gags); Frances Langford as the club’s band singer and fiancée of Manning’s grandson (or was it her son? I forget, though visually it looks like two generations have passed between them, not just one); Mary Beth Hughes as Flo Parker, the femme fatale and super-talented pickpocket whose skill at lifting things off unsuspecting people (including her fellow members of Rocco’s gang) rivals that of Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 masterpiece Trouble in Paradise; and Franklin Pangborn at his absolute nelliest as Sylvester, the club’s manager, who recoils in abject fear at the sight of a gun. Referencing the 1970’s dance diva from San Francisco of the same name, I joked, “This Sylvester isn’t a drag queen – just a queen.” About the only weak cast member is an animated mannequin named Stuart Boyd Crawford as the descendant of Mrs. Schuyler Manning III who’s supposed to be engaged to Julie Russell.

Along the way Frances Langford gets to do two genuinely great songs from the 1920’s, “My Blue Heaven” and “Sleepy Time Gal” – though in an odd throwback to the unwitting genderfuck of a lot of 1920’s records (when music publishers insisted on songs being sung with the same lyrics whether it was a man or a woman singing, which led to such oddities as Bing Crosby singing “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears” and Red McKenzie complaining he “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man”), she sings these songs originally written for males without changing the words. When she gets to the last chorus of “My Blue Heaven” – “Just Molly and me/And baby makes three” – we wonder if she and Molly are a Lesbian couple and they’ve adopted that baby. The Ritz Brothers don’t enter until the second reel – until then it’s Franklin Pangborn who’s given us the most laughs – and they get to do two numbers of their own, including a quite elaborate and entertaining spoof of opera, that unlike some of their other song-and-dance routines are genuinely funny.

Never a Dull Moment is hardly a great film, but it’s a quite clever and pleasant one, and I mentioned to Charles before we watched it that there’s a scene early on in which the Ritzes pose with a giant prop steak. Leonard Maltin published a photo of this scene in his book and captioned it, “Five points to anyone who can figure out this still.” Charles, even before we watched the movie, correctly guessed it was part of a scene spoofing wartime rationing (once I gave the game away by answering his question of when the film was made: 1943), and the gag payoff is one of the Ritzes telling the movie audience, “Don’t get excited. It’s only a fake,” and demonstrating that by knocking at it with his hand. The director of Never a Dull Moment was Edward Lilley, who had been the director of at least one of the rump Ziegfeld Follies presented after Florenz Ziegfeld’s death in 1932, when Ziegfeld’s widow, Billie Burke, licensed the name to Ziegfeld’s hated rival, Lee Shubert, to get out from under the reported $4 million in debt he had left her when he croaked. He came out to Hollywood apparently hoping to direct big-budget musicals and instead got signed to Universal, where he got stuck in the “B” department doing things with titles like Allergic to Love, Babes on Swing Street, My Gal Loves Music and Swing Out, Sister! (My Gal Loves Music is noteworthy for the appearance of a woman billed only as Trixie, a sort of human seal who could balance a giant beach ball on her nose.) One imdb.com “Trivia” commentator insisted that during the dance specialty Grace Poggi does with her partner, Igor Dega, you could see her nipples sticking out through the top of her costume – but either my eyes, the low resolution of the print we were watching, or both made it impossible for me to tell.

Burning Little Lies (Maple Island Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime showed a “premiere” of a film called Burning LIttle Lies – it was originally shot as just Burning Lies but I suspect the folks at Lifetime (the production company was Maple Island Films and the distributors our old friends at Reel One Entertainment) added the word “little” to make the film sound more like Big Little Lies, the quirky suspense novel by Australian writer Liane Moriarty that became a miniseries (with the locale moved from Australia to Monterey, California) and a major hit. Burning Little Lies is set in Los Angeles, but apparently in a small outpost within the city that functions largely like a small town – or at least a movie small town – in which everyone knows everyone else and people who haven’t seen each other since high school suddenly re-meet and recognize each other instantly. It’s yet another Lifetime “premiere” that’s so new imdb.com doesn’t have complete information on it, though at least they list the director and writer – who here are the same person, John Murlowski, though another writer, J. Emilio Martinez, gets “original story” credit – and some of the actors, though not with the names of their characters.

The central character is Heather King (Annika Foster), who’s been working as a fashion designer in Paris when she suddenly flies home after her father and stepmother are killed in a fire in their mountain cabin. (This is one Lifetime movie that begins, not ends, in a deserted mountain cabin.) When she arrives she learns that her stepsister Gwen (Ashlynn Yennie) has already held the funeral and is planning to liquidate the estate immediately – including all the sentimental photos and other possessions Heather remembers from her childhood, among which is a bike with tassels hanging from the handlebars. Heather runs into a high-school acquaintance named Ben (Jamie Roy) who had a crush on her back then, when he was a rather nerdy and nondescript guy nobody in high school particularly liked. Today he’s a buff firefighter and Murlowski and his cinematographer gives us a lot of tantalizing glimpses of his body, including a long scene in which he rescues her after her bike’s brakes fail and she nearly plunges off a cliff. He also carefully builds up Ben as a red herring, making it look like he’s the typical hot-guy Lifetime psycho out to possess and dominate the heroine no matter how many people he has to kill along the way.

Only the big surprise twist at the ending is that Heather’s malevolent stalker, who later sabotages her car so it burns up and she barely escapes with her life, is neither Ben nor her asshole ex-husband Richard but [spoiler alert!] Gwen’s husband Jason (Mark Hupka), whose software company has gone south. He’s lost his biggest investor over delays in the launch of his newest upgrade and the resulting hemorrhaging of his user base, and he figures he can bail himself out of it by murdering his in-laws and his wife’s inconvenient half-sister so he can grab the King family fortune. I’ll say one thing for John Murlowski: he’s an excellent director of action sequences. The three big set-pieces – Heather’s close brushes with death both on her bike and in her car, and a later one in which an unseen driver runs Heather’s ex-husband Richard’s car off the road and over a cliff (noting the similarity of this with the scene in the 1933 The Invisible Man when the title character similarly kills his former associate Kemp by running his car off the road and over a cliff, I said, “Goodbye, Mr. Kemp”) – are all genuinely exciting and suspenseful. The rest of the movie isn’t up to that level but it’s still better-than-average Lifetime, and it’s nice for once that the drop-dead gorgeous hunk is not the psycho villain; indeed, the final scene shows Ben and Heather not only together but Heather visibly pregnant by him, and Gwen congratulating her for having landed the nice man while it was Gwen’s seemingly nice and successful husband who turned out to be the psycho.

So This Is Paris (Warner Brothers, 1926)

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

Yesterday I watched a fascinating silent film on Turner Classic Movies – they’ve torn up their usual schedule because they’re doing their latest film festival on the channel as part of the “virtualization” of virtually everything under the viral lash of SARS-CoV-2 but they put on a silent with their usual host, Jacqueline Stewart, albeit at 5 p.m. instead of their usual 9 p.m It was called So This Is Paris and was made at Warner Brothers (back when they were still spelling out the word “Brothers” instead of abbreviating it “Bros.”) in 1926. It’s a film of interest today mainly because of the director, Ernst Lubitsch, and the writer, Hans Kräly. A number of directors with huge reputations in film history set their styles in long-term collaborations with particular writers, and sometimes the writers have got credit for this – like Dudley Nichols with John Ford and Robert Riskin with Frank Capra – and sometimes they haven’t. Virtually no one who writes about Alfred Hitchcock today gives more than a passing mention to Charles Bennett, even though Bennett wrote six of Hitchcock’s films (five in Britain and one, Foreign Correspondent, in the U.S.) and more than any other collaborator was instrumental in setting what came to be the “Hitchcock style.” For Lubitsch that writer was Hans Kräly, whom he brought with him when he won a Hollywood contract offer on the strength of his German-made international hit Passion, a story of Madame Du Barry which also made a worldwide star of the actress who played her, Pola Negri.

Lubitsch’s first American film was the Mary Pickford vehicle Rosita, one of Pickford’s efforts to shed her “America’s Sweetheart” stereotype and play a part of real dramatic depth. Alas, it was a flop both commercially and critically (and Pickford, who usually was fanatical about storing copies of her own films, let that one go – the extant print, which I’ve seen on a previous TCM showing, had to be pieced together from various partial sources, mostly a print from Russia), and Lubitsch found himself without a studio home and desperate for work. He got a contract from Warner Bros. when they were still a struggling studio – before they hit major status with the success of The Jazz Singer and their purchase of the First National studio with the profits from it and Al Jolson’s even more successful second film, The Singing Fool – and he and Kräly started putting together the kinds of sophisticated romantic comedies that eventually became the Lubitsch trademark. Alas, at least according to what I’ve read, the Lubitsch-Kräly collaboration ended when Kräly started an affair with Mrs. Lubitsch, and rather than react in the oh-well, what-the-hell men-will-be-men-and-women-will-be-women fashion of a Lubitsch character, the real Lubitsch had a jealous hissy-fit and banned Kräly from his future projects.

So This Is Paris was based on an old French play by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Hálevy (writers better known today for their opera libretti, including Gounod’s Faust, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann and Thomas’s Hamlet, which they weirdly rewrote to provide a happy ending and then had to re-rewrite when the opera was produced in London and someone realized that in Shakespeare’s home country a Hamlet with a happy ending would be laughed off the stage) and concerns two couples who live across the street from each other, Dr. Paul Giraud (Monte Blue) and his wife Suzanne (Patsy Ruth Miller), and Maurice (André Beranger) and Georgette (Lilyan Tashman) Lalle. When the film opens the Lalles are in full Arab costume, with him as a Valentino-esque sheik with full headdress, billowing pants and almost nothing on in between, and her in princess drag laying on a couch. He’s about to stab her when he presses a little button on the dagger’s handle so the blade will fold away, and we assume that these are actors and the main characters are watching a play. In fact we’re in the Lalles’ home and they’re rehearsing a ballet, with an old guy at the piano who composed the music and is not particularly happy with their performance. One person who is happy about it is Suzanne Giraud, who gets a glimpse of Maurice’s bare chest and immediately gets the hots for him. Meanwhile Maurice is not particularly happy with Georgette, complaining that she’s put on too much weight for him to lift her at the end of their dance.

The two couples carry on a flirtation with each other’s spouses that lasts through much of the movie and includes a spectacular sequence set in a huge nightclub – it’s supposed to represent the “Artists’ Ball” one of the would-be adulterers has invited his would-be partner to but it’s essentially a musical sequence even in a silent film. It features a Black band (though I suspect a lot of the “Black” musicians were really white actors in blackface) doing a hot version of the Charleston (remember that the song “Charleston” was written by Black pianist and composer James P. Johnson) with the entire crowd seemingly joining in. In the early sound period Lubitsch would make some of the most stylish musicals ever – usually with Maurice Chevalier as the lead and Jeanette MacDonald as the heroine – but oddly none of them featured the sort of elaborate production number he was going for here in a silent film. Midway through the action Maurice Lalle has a run-in with a police officer (Sidney D’Allbrook) and ends up with a three-day jail sentence hanging over his head; he’s so unconcerned about it that he puts on full evening dress, telling his wife he’s going to jail when he’s really going to that artists’ ball – though in the end he’s apprehended and has to serve his time, which pulls him away from Suzanne and Paul away from Georgette. The final scene is introduced with a typical Kräly title – “When two liars get together … ” – and it’s Paul and Suzanne at home together, the normal marital order restored at last (as was inevitable in a Hollywood film even in the genuinely “pre-Code” era of 1926) as they prepare for a night of hot snuggling while the newspaper reports Maurice’s incarceration. (It must have been a slow news year.)

TCM host Jacqueline Stewart (an African-American woman who – unlike some of TCM’s other hosts of color – is also genuinely knowledgeable and personable) lamented that this wasn’t a sound film and therefore didn’t contain the marvelous comic dialogue of Lubitsch’s later films, but that’s being unfair to Kräly (no separate title writer is credited so I’m assuming the intertitles are his as well as the overall script), who comes up with some genuinely witty lines, including one early on: “If that person were a weekend, there would never be any parties!” What So This Is Paris lacks is a truly great cast: the people in this movie are adequate enough for their roles, but one wonders what this film could have become in an early-talkie remake with Chevalier, MacDonald, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy – who’s actually in this movie in the nothing role of a maid. Jacqueline Stewart lamented that both Lubitsch and Loy became known for sophisticated romantic comedies but they never worked together again. Still, So This Is Paris is a workmanlike film and helped to re-establish Lubitsch’s reputation and get him a more prestigious berth at Paramount, followed by stints at MGM and 20th Century-Fox (where he was working until he died in 1948 in the middle of shooting a film called That Lady in Ermine – the studio hired Otto Preminger to replace him, apparently because both were German, but going from the easygoing Lubitsch to the tyrannical Preminger so unnerved the film’s star, Betty Grable, it traumatized her for the rest of her life).

Memories of a Murder (Studiofest Productions, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a movie called Memories of a Murder – not to be confused with two movies that show up on imdb.com when you search for that title called Memories of Murder without the indefinite article, a 1990 TV-movie starring Nancy Allen and a 2003 Asian production that at least some people online regard as a classic, made in South Korea by director Bong Joon Ho, which was apparently inspired by a real-life killing that was unsolved when the film was made but was solved later. The 2021 Memories of a Murder is so underdocumented that imdb.com lists four cast members but doesn’t identify them with their roles. Neither do they list a director or writer, but judging from my hastily scrawled chicken scratches as I tried to take down the names from the credits, the director is Ann Milami and the writer is Matthew Sorvillo. The two seemed to be tweaking the usual Lifetime formulae in the direction of Gothic horror: they begin the movie with a rather nerdy young man named Ryan – with a tousled head of hair that makes it look like he’s auditioning for a biopic of the young Bob Dylan – walking into a bar run by two heavy-duty biker types and asking if this is the place where a particularly notorious murder happened. They’re excessively reluctant to talk about it, but eventually – after signaling that he’s unwelcome there when one of them pours the beer they’ve just sold him into a glass and drinks it himself – they say yes just before they throw him out.

He goes off into the darkness and then gets himself murdered while he’s wearing a jacket that previously belonged to a serial killer and for which he paid $1,500 to a shop called Morbid Curiosities in Frankfort. It’s not clear which state this particular Frankfort is in – answers.com (https://www.answers.com/Q/Is_there_a_city_named_Frankfurt_in_US) lists several cities named Frankfort in the U.S., in states including Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, New York, Ohio, and South Dakota. While I was watching the movie I assumed based on the “:country” ambience that it was the one in Kentucky, but later on in the movie writer Sorvillo drops a hint that it’s really the one in Michigan. Morbid Curiosities turns out to be a shop run by a recent high-school graduate named Gail Niven (Isabella Pisacane), though it’s actually owned by a fiercely possessive wheelchair-bound grandmother, Margo Dibbin (Jamie Donnelly, who in her younger years had played young women in the original stage productions of Grease and The Rocky Horror Show). Gail has won an acceptance letter from a university – it’s not clear which one or where, but it would involve her leaving town and, when the university calls to confirm that she got the acceptance letter, grandma takes the call and literally laughs at Gail’s pretension that Margo would ever allow her to leave home. Gail’s only friend in town is Alexa (Abby Awe), who isn’t an official partner or employee of Morbid Curiosities but hangs out on the store a lot and in an excessive amount of altruism even agrees to staff the counter when Gail has business outside.

Morbid Curiosities’ business is selling murder memorabilia – which is a real and surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly) thriving business, though most of the people who deal in “murderabilia” in real life do so online. The reason for that becomes clear as the townspeople of Frankfort – particularly the city’s richest and most influential family, the Kellys, – approach Gail and demand that she close the shop and leave town because it’s giving the community a bad name. The representative of the Kellys that makes herself particularly obnoxious is the family’s spoiled-princess daughter Tori – though her cousin Rory (a guy) not only doesn’t go along with Tori’s jihad against Morbid Curiosities but befriends Gail and even tries to cruise her. While all this is going on a police detective named Jamie Roesland (Rosa Gilmore) shows up; she’s based in the neighboring town of Traverse City (which definitively establishes the locale as Michigan) and she’s in Frankfort to investigate the murder of Ryan, the little guy from the prologue who showed up in the wrong bar at the wrong time and got himself killed wearing the jacket of a famous serial killer. Other people start turning up dead in Frankfort itself and soon Gail finds herself the prime suspect.

Just after Ryan’s killing she had got a mysterious box, not traceably shipped through the post office or any private company but merely left there, and shortly afterwards she got a call demanding that she put the items within the box – a blood-stained knife block and other trophies from a recent murder, including a pair of glasses and an animal knickknack – that only later are reported as souvenirs of a recent murder in the area. Gail protests to the unseen voice that she can’t possibly offer these items for sale without any authentication, but the voice continues to harass her as the body count goes up. Detective Roesland works the new cases even though they’re happening in Frankfort, outside her jurisdiction – a clue I should have made more of than I did – and soon it turns out that Gail’s real last name is not Niven but Stubbs, and she’s the daughter of G. W. Stubbs, known as the “Michigan Taxidermy Killer” because after he offed his victims he literally cut their skin off and stuffed them. Stubbs just happens to be incarcerated for these crimes in a prison within easy driving distance of Frankfort, and Gail goes to see him. Their first meeting ends inconclusively but at the second one both of them realize they are father and daughter, and the plot devolves from there.

Meanwhile Gail’s grandmother Margo industriously works to make herself a red herring, having Gail fetch her mice from the local pet store so she can feed them to her pet snake – in one of the film’s most haunting scenes Margo narrates a twisted rewrite of the Book of Genesis to her granddaughter, saying that Adam wanted to keep Eve barefoot, pregnant and ignorant and it was the serpent who spared her that fate and thus should be regarded as the benefactor of all womanhood – and in the middle of one big confrontation scene between her and Gail, Margo dramatically gets up from her wheelchair and reveals that she can really walk. Writer Sorvillo obviously intended this as a real shocker, but it won’t be any surprise to anyone who’s seen as many 1930’s movies as I have, since in films of that period characters who were seen in wheelchairs almost never really needed them but were merely posing as cripples for some nefarious purpose. (This only changed in 1938, when Lionel Barrymore’s long struggle with arthritis deprived him of the ability to walk and forced him to use a wheelchair for real, whereupon the management at MGM had to find him parts he could play from a chair.)

Detective Roesland confronts Gail and insists that all the killings she’s investigating center around her store, and since grandma is wheelchair-bound Gail is the only possible suspect. Both she and writer Sorvillo are ignoring Alexa, who hangs around the shop so much and does so much unpaid work for them I was assuming she would turn out to be the real killer – but in the end it turns out to be [spoiler alert!] the police detective herself, whose mother was a victim of the Micigan Taxidermy Killer (Gail’s dad, remember) and who determined to get rid of the “bad seed” of Gail’s bloodline by framing her for the murders and then killing her, ostensibly in the line of duty. Only Gail, in an example of the Chekhovian dictum that if you establish a pistol in act one it must go off in act three, turns out to have inherited her father’s double-jointedness (which he demonstrated to both her and us in one of her prison visits) and uses it to escape the detective’s handcuffs. Gail overpowers the bad policewoman and nearly strangles her to death – director Milami (assuming I got her name right) makes the mistake of cutting away in mid-strangulation and thereby not letting us know whether the detective survives Gail’s assault (I would have wanted her to give Isabella Pisacane the chance to act the conflicting emotions, at first determined to kill Jamie and then relenting and letting her live because if she killed her she’d be no better than her dad) until a final tag scene, in which Gail drives by the local prison and sees Jamie in the exercise yard.

Memories of a Murder is a pretty silly film plot-wise and all Milami’s attempts at Gothic atmospherics don’t really help that much – though the straightforward approach most Lifetime hacks would have taken would have been even worse. This is also a typical modern entertainment in that there isn’t anyone in it we really like: Gail’s overall twitchiness makes it impossible for us to warm up to her as the innocent victim of a frame, her grandmother is virtually a figure from hell, taking possessiveness to ridiculous levels – she seems to come off as a combination of Norman Bates’ mother in the backstory to Psycho and Agnes Moorehead’s mother-ln-law literally from hell in Bewitched – and we can’t stand that busybody cop well before she’s revealed as the villain. Memories of a Murder is the sort of movie that’s wretched by any normal standard of quality, but it’s also oddly haunting and one can admire the talent behind it both in front of and behind the cameras even though one wishes all that talent could have been put to better use.