A Date with Danger (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was a film called A Date with Danger, which was mostly pretty normal Lifetime fare although it had a few deviations from their usual formulae. The central character is Nikki Hansen (Lara Jean Chorostecki), who moves to a small town from the big city (neither of these locations are specified more than that) with her teenage daughter Brooke (Jaida Grace) in tow. Brooke’s dad periodically abandons the family and then suddenly returns, sort of like Yancey Cravat in Edna Ferber’s Cimarron and the films adapted from it, only Nikki has finally given up on any chance of holding him down and making it work between them as a couple. Instead she’s decided to relocate and she’s secured a home in what’s pretty obviously an abandoned and converted church building. While on the street with her daughter she’s accosted by Gavin (Jamie Spikchuk), owner of Note of Grace Coffee, who gives her a coupon for a free cup of coffee but is obviously interested in more from her than that. Later on, when Brooke demands that her mom take her shopping for a new wardrobe even though mom says she can’t afford it, Nikki and Brooke stumble on the local boutique, Not Your Mom’s Closet, and its proprietress, Liz Cole (Ipsita Paul). The moment we see that Liz is African-American we hardened Lifetime watchers immediately assume she’s being set up for the usual fate of an African-American woman on this channel: to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine. Actually Liz has a different role to play in the story: she’s more like Nikki’s fairy godmother, offering her a job in the store and mentoring her as much as possible about romantic possibilities in the town.

Alas, Liz is in the middle of an excruciatingly bitter divorce with Dan Miller (Matt Wells), a relationship that went far enough back that their daughter Anna (Kayla Hutton) is Brooke’s age and Nikki tries to get the two of them to bond because Brooke, ripped out of her school and away from all her friends by her mom’s sudden decision to move, needs all the friends (and all the help in school; she laments, “Half the kids are ahead of me and the other half are behind me”) she can get. If I were in this movie I’d probably be warning Liz to date Black men for a change – except that there don’t seem to be any – since the two guys we know she’s been involved with are both white and were both disasters. After she divorced Dan she started a brief affair with Gavin, only he was too possessive and controlling – among other things, he wanted her to close her shop and move in with him almost immediately – and having already been through one relationship with a possessive, controlling man who wanted to run her life and didn’t want her to have a career outside the marriage, she wasn’t going to tolerate another. Liz tries to warn Nikki away from getting involved with Gavin, only like a typical Lifetime heroine Nikki doesn’t take her friend’s advice. Soon Gavin is showering her with expensive gifts, including a guitar (Brooke had a chance to take guitar lessons in school if she could come up with an instrument, Nikki said they couldn’t afford it and she should try choir instead, but Gavin said he had an old guitar gathering dust and Brooke could have it) to a pendant previously worn by Gavin’s wife (he said their child was stillborn and his wife never recovered from the trauma and eventually killed herself, but we’re thinking, “Yeah, right … ”) and even tickets for a vacation to Ireland. (Gavin has noticed a Celtic cross on Nikki’s keychain and figured the Emerald Isle is her ancestral homeland, and when she says, “Yeah, I’d like to go there some day … ” Gavin decided to make it happen).

One of the most annoying things about A Date with Danger is the mystery of where both Gavin and Liz get their money; they’re supposed to be local independent businesspeople in a small town but they seem to have bottomless financial resources. Liz has enough money to hire Nikki off the bat, and enough assets that when she disappears midway through the story her fortune becomes a principal part of the story as Liz turns out to have changed her will to leave virtually all of it to Nikki. As for Gavin, he’s running a coffeehouse out of a converted barn (just about every building in this town seems to have been converted from something else) but he’s still got enough money for tickets to Ireland and lots of other goodies with which he hopes to woo Nikki. Writer John Burd and director Cat Hostick (odd to see a Lifetime movie written by a man and directed by a woman; usually it’s the other way around!) keep the melodrama percolating for about an hour or so – this is unusually slow-moving for Lifetime – until we get to the scene that was used as one of Lifetime’s typical prologues, in which we see a bit of action whose significance will only be apparent later. Nikki has broken off with Gavin because she thinks he’s moving too fast for her and sees “red flags” in his behavior that are warning her off the relationship. Gavin goes ballistic and recognizes the phrase “red flags” as one Liz used about him, too, so he responds by breaking into her clothes shop, kidnapping her and holding her hostage in the basement of his coffeehouse. The cops suspect Nikki of being behind Liz’s disappearance because Liz just changed her will to leave that mysterious fortune of hers to Nikki in case anything happens to her. Nikki herself suspects Liz’s ex-husband Dan and thinks he either killed or kidnapped her as part of the fallout from their divorce case and to win full custody of his daughter Anna. Nikki has Anna assigned to her temporary custody and Dan shows up, trying to take her – and Anna, in just about the one degree of moral complexity in this movie, wants to go with him because, however much of an asshole Liz said he was, he is still her father.

Later, when Nikki figures out where Liz is, Dan follows her there – and ends up kidnapped himself. Gavin hits on the idea of killing both Liz and Dan and making it look like a murder-suicide, only eventually – after some confusing action in and around that basement – Nikki frees Liz and the two women overpower Dan. They’re rescued by the police, led by Detective Banks (Raven Dauda), yet another African-American authority figure in a Lifetime movie, and somewhat to our surprise Gavin is actually arrested and taken into custody by the police. Usually Lifetime villains are either killed or escape and get tag scenes suggesting they’re going to pull the same scheme somewhere else. A Date with Danger offers the women characters a bit more agency than most Lifetime films, but it’s still pretty much what Maureen Dowd called “pussies in peril” and it doesn’t help that, though Jamie Spikchuk is rugged and easy on the eyes, he’s not the drop-dead gorgeous hunk of masculinity Lifetime usually casts as its male villains. I joked to my husband Charles, who had to suffer through this with me, “A date with danger? Is there an app for that?” He joked right back, “Sure there is. It’s called Grindr” – the on-line hook-up service for Gay men that was recently purchased by a Chinese company, which creates the scary possibility that a relentlessly homophobic government like China’s might have a listing of thousands of American Gay men, ready for whatever concentration camps or Gulags the Chinese might send them to if and when China, with their growing political, economic and military clout, takes over the West and/or calls the loans they’ve been making to prop up the U.S. government (at least 25 percent of America’s national debt is held by the Chinese).

Sherlock Holmes (Fox Film Corporation, 1932)

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

Following the Lifetime movie I showed Charles a movie I’ve literally wanted to see for decades, and finally got my chance when, like the purloined letter in the Edgar Allan Poe story that so inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes in the first place, the movie turned out to have been hiding in plain sight on YouTube since 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVOtpzoGrGQ): Sherlock Holmes, made by director William K. Howard for the Fox Film Corporation in 1932 (three years before the merger that created 20th Century-Fox) from a script by Bertram Millhauser, the writer a lot of Holmes devotees love to hate because he worked on a lot of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce-Roy William Neill Holmes films from Universal in the mid-1940’s and played pretty fast and loose with the Holmes canon. He already was doing that for this film, but the 1932 Sherlock Holmes is actually a quite good movie, albeit with some flaws, and one of the few landmarks in the generally sorry history of pre-Rathbone Holmes films. British actor Clive Brook, already an old hand at both silent and sound films, played Holmes for the third and last time in his career, with Reginald Owen as his Dr. Watson (the next year Owen would play Holmes himself in Edwin L. Marin’s 1933 A Study in Scarlet, a not-bad film but hardly at the quality level of this one).

William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film was somewhat less than thrilled about Brook’s Holmes – “Despite his physical ‘rightness’ for the role, and an undeniable screen ‘presence,’ Clive Brook fell somewhat short of being the ideal movie Holmes. His diction was fine, the detached imperturbability just right, and yet there was an air of condescension to his interpretation, as though the role wasn’t quite worth taking seriously” – but I think he’s one of the better pre-Rathbone Holmeses and I like him considerably better than Everson’s favorite, Arthur Wontner. (Wontner played Holmes in five British films from 1930 to 1937, of which four survive; he was great at the cerebral scenes but too old and underwhelming to be credible as the man of action Conan Doyle also envisioned.) Millhauser’s script is an odd jumble of elements, but the opening scene is unforgettable: silhouettes of authority figures parade up and down a circular window, obviously part of prison, and the scene cuts to Professor James Moriarty (Ernest Torrence) in a courtroom as sentence is about to be pronounced on him. He’s expecting to be sentenced to death for his murder conviction, but he predictably swears that the rope has not been woven that will hang him and he intends to escape and kill, in alphabetical sequence, the three people he holds most responsible for his predicament: prosecutor Erskine; Col. Gore-King of Scotland Yard (Alan Mowbray); and, of course, Sherlock Holmes, whom Moriarty announces that he will disgrace before he dies.

Then, in an exciting silent action sequence with effective musical accompaniment (in its heavy use of underscoring by composers R. H. Bassett and Hugo Friedhofer, Sherlock Holmes often looks and sounds like a film from the mid- to late-1930’s instead of 1932), Moriarty makes good his threat to escape, leaving behind a graffito message on the wall of his empty cell, “Tell Sherlock Holmes I’m OUT – Moriarty.” Moriarty immediately sets about making good on his threats by using a carnival as a front to recruit an all-star group of assassins (they gain admission to his secret redoubt by scoring heavily on a shooting-gallery game, thereby proving their markspersonship and worthiness in joining Moriarty’s all-star crime club): Hans Dreiaugen (Lucien Prival) of Germany – the last name literally means “three eyes” – Gaston Roux of France (Robert Graves) – one wonders if the name was based on Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera – Manuel Lopez of Spain (Roy D’Arcy, Prince Mirko in the 1925 Erich von Stroheim film The Merry Widow); and Homer Jones of the U.S. Jones quickly becomes the most important of Moriarty’s new associates as he proposes to introduce the protection racket to the U.K. and bombs at least four of London’s most prominent pubs to show he and Moriarty’s gang mean business. One of them is owned by George (Herbert Mundin), whose part is so prominent he’s billed above Reginald Owen as Dr. Watson. Indeed, Watson is so unimportant to this story Holmes actually spends more time on screen with his servant boy Billy (Howard Leeds in a role the very young Charlie Chaplin played when William Gillette, the actor who wrote the first Holmes play based on an early draft by Conan Doyle, came to Britain from the U.S. to play the role in Holmes’ homeland), who takes over from Watson as Holmes’ main assistant.

At the start of the movie Holmes is planning to retire from crime-fighting and, as a parting gift, is about to present Col. Gore-King and his superior at Scotland Yard, Sir Albert Hastings (Claude King) with a new invention he’s whipped up in his laboratory (using some of the same lab equipment Kenneth Strickfaden devised and most famously rented out to Universal for the Frankenstein movies) that will allow the police to short-circuit the motor of any getaway car as soon as they get within 200 yards of it. (The fact that such a gizmo would also short-circuit any innocent motorist that happened to be in range at the same time as the crooks doesn’t seem to occur to anybody in the film.) Holmes’ girlfriend Alice Faulkner (Miriam Jordan, who’s second-billed but doesn’t have much to do) has persuaded him to retire from crime-fighting and become a gentleman farmer (what, not a bee-keeper?), but of course Moriarty’s escape and his threats propel Holmes out of retirement. In addition to launching an American-style protection racket in London, Moriarty and his international gang of thugs are also pulling a caper by which they plan to tunnel underground into the vaults of the bank owned by Alice Faulkner’s father – and they’ve somehow been able to blackmail Faulkner père to go along with them. What’s more, Moriarty plans to murder Col. Gore-King and frame Holmes for it – only Holmes figures out what Moriarty’s plan is and gets Gore-King to play dead. The climax is a big action scene in the bank vault in which Moriarty is killed (at least temporarily, sequelae and series being what they are) that is directed with so many oblique angles and shadows in the lighting it looks like they’re robbing The Bank Vault of Dr. Caligari.

Indeed, the most interesting and watchable aspect of this film is the so-called “German look” of the visuals: all those stylized cityscapes straight out of Fritz Lang’s M, all those chase scenes in which the people throw long shadows, all those oblique angles and that overall sense of a lawless nightmare buried barely under the service of a normal London environment. When I first read Tag Gallagher’s biography of John Ford I had been skeptical of his claim that the arrival of German director F. W. Murnau on the Fox lot in 1927 had moved a lot of U.S.-born directors like Ford, William K. Howard, Frank Borzage and David Butler to adopt more shadowy, Expressionistic lighting in the Weimar era German style, but as I’ve seen more Fox films from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s in which the “German style” shows up as extensively as it does here (or in remarkable Code-benders like 1931’s musical Delicious, directed by David Butler; or the marvelous Clara Bow vehicle Call Her Savage from 1932, directed by John Francis Dillon) the more I’ve come to the conclusion that Gallagher was right. The marvelous German-style scenes of darkness and shadow help make up for the relative dullness of some of the more straightforward dialogue scenes and in particular the misfire of casting Herbert Mundin and giving him so much screen time for so-called “comic relief.” Also on the “down” side of this film – and this I wasn’t expecting – is Ernest Torrence as Moriarty: as good as he was at lower-class villainy (including his final film, as the conscience-stricken immigrant smuggler in James Cruze’s 1933 film I Cover the Waterfront), he’s really not that good at Moriarty’s more aristocratic sort of villainy. My favorite Moriartys remain the first two from the Rathbone series: George Zucco in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (which if pressed I’d name as my favorite Holmes film ever, even though it has precious little to do with the canon) and Lionel Atwill in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon – but overall the 1932 Sherlock Holmes is a superb film, nowhere near film noir thematically but awfully close to it visually and a good deal of fun to watch for reasons that have little or nothing to do with its status as a Sherlock Holmes movie.

Columbo: “Sex and the Married Detective” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, 1989)

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

My husband Charles and I night-capped last evening by watching a Sundance Channel rerun of a Columbo episode from April 3, 1989 – rather late in the day for this show – called “Sex and the Married Detective,” which was about a psychotherapist named Dr. Joan Allenby (Lindsay Crouse, turning in a superb villainess performance), author of a book called The Courtesan Complex whose basic premise is that in order to revivify their marriages, women should pretend to be Camille-style high-end hookers. She and her boyfriend David Kincaid (Stephen Macht) have parlayed the success of her book into a successful radio show (which writer Jerrold L. Ludwig has her broadcasting at the start of the episode so we know instantly what sort of a character she is and what her publicly aired views about sex are) and are about to cut a deal to put her on television. Only first she has to go to Chicago for a meeting of the broadcasters who are syndicating her show nationwide, but because O’Hare Airport is snowed in she can’t leave that night – so she returns to her office and in particular to the so-called “therapy room,” which is set up to look like a room in a 19th century bordello, complete with a velvet comforter on the bed, a fireplace, gilded chairs and Venetian blinds, through which (thanks to some artfully composed shots by director James Frawley and cinematographer Robert Seaman) she sees David in flagrante delicto with the other (and considerably younger and hotter) woman on her staff, Cindy (Julia Montgomery).

So she hatches an elaborate revenge plot to disguise herself in a black outfit – black top, black pants, a long black wig and a black men’s-style fedora – and pose as a high-class hooker called “Lisa.” On a night the couple was supposed to go to a music benefit at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, she changes into the disguise in the facility’s restroom (we know it’s a high-class venue because the sign on the restroom says “Ladies” instead of “Women”), lures David to a sleazy but still high-end bar called “Buckets” (in one of Hollywood»s oldest and dumbest clichés, as the locale shifts the music cuts from “πrespectable” classical to sleazy jazz) and comes on to him in courtesan drag. It’s established that he knows who she really is but no one else in the bar does – neither has ever been there before – and she takes him not to their home but to the bordello room in her office complex (which is designed, she explains later on, to inspire couples whose sex life has dwindled to rekindle it by engaging their sense of fantasy), where she insists he’s only going to be allowed to do what she says, and at the moment he’s expecting to get it on she shoots him instead with a .9 mm gun, the sort of toy gun that generally gets presented in mystery fiction as a “woman’s gun.” In fact she drills him so accurately from so far away with that teeny-tiny gun it’s a wonder she kills him with just one shot; she’d have to be either lucky or a practiced markswoman to do it.

Anyway, the case gets turned over to Our Hero, Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk), who in the course of the two-hour running time (the original Columbo episodes were 90 minutes but later NBC and Universal padded them out to two hours, mainly by adding campy little asides and weird bits of business for Falk to do) uses his usual strategy of annoying the killer into confessing. Along the way we get to see and hear Columbo play the tuba surprisingly well – during his investigation he’s walked into a tuba class at the Pavilion – and we also see him crash a bartending class (the teacher was also the bartender at Buckets the night David picked up “Lisa”) and offer therapeutic advice to all the male colleagues of Dr. Allenby, including Dr. Simon Ward (Peter Jurasik) and Dr. Walter Neff (Ken Lerner), both of which asked Columbo, of all people, to let them know when it would be appropriate for them to declare their crushes on Dr. Allenby now that their primary competition has been removed. Columbo answers with the sorts of empty things real therapists say, and writer Ludwig was obviously savoring the role reversal. By this time in its run Columbo was mostly coasting along on sheer campiness – in some ways the entire show was a throwback to the comedy-mysteries so popular in 1930’s Hollywood (of which the best examples were W. S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man and James Whale’s Remember Last Night?; I’m also particularly fond of Stephen Roberts’ The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, in which divorced couple William Powell and Jean Arthur reconcile while teamed up to solve a murder mystery) before the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon killed off the appetite for comedy-mysteries and launched the film noir cycle.

This one was made special by Lindsay Crouse’s performance as the killer – it was a time when celebrities fought hard to get guest shots on Columbo as the villain, and one I’d particularly like to see was one being featured on Sundance’s promos in which Johnny Cash played the killer. Though Cash rarely acted – unlike fellow Sun Records alumnus Elvis Presley, he concentrated on music (imdb.com lists 35 acting credits for him, but almost all are music videos he shot in his later career) – the few films of his I’ve seen (a surprisingly good performance as a psycho kidnapper in a silly film called Five Minutes to Live and a great performance in a quite good film called A Gunfight, in which he and Kirk Douglas play rival gunslingers and Cash holds his own with Douglas in the acting department) indicate he could have become an excellent actor (much better than Elvis!) if he’d followed that path.

Godzilla vs. Kong. (Warner Bros., Legendary Entertainment, 2021)

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

Over the last few days I’ve accumulated a backlog of movies I haven’t written about for the moviemagg blog yet, two of which my husband Charles and I watched last Tuesday (on his regularly scheduled day off) and two of which I watched late Sunday on Lifetime. The big feature was Godzilla vs. Kong, fourth and last in the “Monsterverse” cycle Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment have been making since 2014, when those two American companies licensed the character of Godzilla from Toho Studios in Japan (the films credit Toho with creating Godzilla, which of course is nonsense; intellectual content is created by people, not corporations, and the person who dreamed up Godzilla and directed quite a few of his films, including the first one, was Ishirô Honda, sometimes spelled Inoshiro Honda). According to a Wikipedia page called “Godzilla Franchise,” Warners’ and Legendary’s license from Toho to use the Godzilla character ended in 2021, which suggests this may be the last “Monsterverse” movie we get from them – as does the absence of the sort of post-credits tag sequence we got in the previous films Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. (An imdb.com “Trivia” post says director Adam Wingard actually shot a post-credits sequence but ended up using it in the main part of the film instead.) I got into these movies when Charles attempted to rent Godzilla vs. Kong at a Redbox machine but couldn’t find one in working order, and I went on Amazon.com and found that the boxed set that also included Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters was actually about a dollar or so cheaper than Godzilla vs. Kong alone. So I bought the box with all three movies and decided to run them in order – which turned out to be a wise move because much of Godzilla vs. Kong would have been incomprehensible if we hadn’t seen the previous two.

The ending of Godzilla: King of the Monsters had left all the big creatures – variously referred to as “monsters” and “Titans” (after the original Greek myths in which the Titans were the precursors of the gods, who were their descendants until they staged a family rebellion, took over and ate the Titans) – more or less back under the control of MONARCH, the secretive government agency that had unearthed them in the first place – only a company called Apex Corporation is attempting to create their own mechanical version of Godzilla and, in these efforts, is creating sonic vibrations that rouse the original Godzilla from his sleep in the Atlantic Ocean (never mind that he got radioactive and blew up in a nuclear explosion at the end of Godzilla: King of the Monsters; apparently you can’t keep a good-bad mega-dinosaur down!) and turn him anti-social again. The newly awakened Godzilla wipes out much of Miami (making this film uncomfortably topical given the continuing story of the catastrophic collapse of a Miami Beach condo building from which, over a week later, they are still digging out both survivors and victims while over 100 people remain missing and unaccounted for. It also, as I noted at the end of my comments on Godzilla: King of the Monsters, begs the question of how all the damage the monsters have done to various cities is going to get repaired and who is going to pay for it.) With the media reporting that Godzilla, hailed as the savior of humanity from fellow titans led by the three-headed interplanetary monster Ghidorah (also known as “Monster Zero”), has once again turned against it, There are the usual clashing agendas of the human characters, including the woman who had been responsible for maintaining Kong’s quarantine enclosure on Skull Island, Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and her deaf-mute daughter Maia Simmons (Eiza González), who becomes Kong’s interlocutor after she teaches him sign language (recalling the efforts of real researchers to teach gorillas sign language; they reply, but the scientists haven’t been able to determine whether they’re actually communicating or merely imitating and repeating back the signs they’ve seen humans do).

An expedition from Apex led by Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård, top-billed) crashes through the entrance to the hollow earth (these films assume that the earth is hollow, with a whole other ecosystem below its surface, including a sun-like source of light, heat and energy which, of course, the capitalist exploiters at Apex hope to tap as a salable commodity) in a specially designed craft that gives us some wild action that I wouldn’t be surprised to see pressed into service as a thrill-park ride the way the subway attack in the original 1933 King Kong has been. There are also a couple of comic-relief characters who end up trapped in one of Apex’s giant machines and transported halfway across the world to the site of the big monster battles, and while some of the characters from Godzilla: King of the Monsters return, notably scientist Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) and his daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), Madison, a character of rare agency and independence for a pre-teen in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, gets bounced down to a traditional damsel-in-distress in this one, a distressing fate for a first-rate child actress who’s been acclaimed for, among other things, her work on the TV series Stranger Things.

Of course we eventually get some of the titular battles between Godzilla and Kong – in this film Godzilla is depicted as 390 feet tall and Kong as 336 feet, quite a departure from the 1933 original, in which Kong was described as 50 feet tall in the dialogue but was shown as considerably shorter than that: 18 feet in the Skull Island sequences and 24 feet in the New York ones. As Orville “Goldie” Goldner (who actually worked as an effects technician on the 1933 King Kong) and George W. Turner wrote in their book The Making of King Kong, “His proportion was originally intended to provide an effective dramatic relationship between Kong and the players. That an inordinately big monster is as impersonal as a hurricane has been demonstrated by those dreadful Japanese films of the 1960’s featuring a 500-foot whatsit called ‘Godzilla.’ … It was [producer-director Merian C. Cooper’s] conception of the beast that he must always appear gigantic, but never so large as to destroy his interest in the human players.” Unfortunately, that’s one of Cooper’s good ideas that got ignored in this iteration of the Kong legend – just as Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of the 1933 King Kong ran 187 minutes, as if Jackson, here as in his Lord of the Rings movies and his even more ludicrously inflated three-film cycle based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s prequel, The Hobbit (a normal-sized novel that got stretched into three nearly three-hour films), simply couldn’t bear to leave anything he’d shot on the cutting-room floor. By contrast, Goldner and Turner wrote, Merian Cooper ruthlessly edited the original King Kong from a 140-minute rough cut to the 100-minute final version, ticking off the effects people who lamented having put their hearts into creating elaborate sequences no audience member would ever see, but as Goldner and Turner wrote, “Cooper was right, of course. He set his jaw and cut his own ideas with a ruthlessness that must have given him nightmares. In doing this he delivered to the public a movie that holds the attention during every one of its scenes, each second of its 100 minutes. It is one of the few films that builds its suspense deliberately and then holds it until the last fade-out because there is no useless action, no waste of words, no side-plots to detract from the main stream of the story it tells – a show without fat or padding. Cooper’s skill as an editor is no less remarkable than any of his other achievements.” I lost all interest in seeing the Peter Jackson King Kong when I learned it ran over three hours – no one would ever accuse him of cutting his own ideas ruthlessly and creating a movie without fat or padding – and I must say to the credit of Adam Wingard, director of Godzilla vs. Kong, that he is much more like Merian Cooper than Peter Jackson in this regard.

Wingard, working from a script by the usual committee (Terry Rossio, Zach Shields and Godzilla: King of the Monsters auteur Michael Dougherty, story; Erik Pearson and Max Borenstein, screenplay), was determined to keep Godzilla vs. Kong’s running time under two hours, ticking off both studio executives who wanted a three-hour blockbuster and fans who thought a shorter running time would short-change them on monster action. (Wingard told an online interviewer that even if he’d made Godzilla vs. Kong three hours long, the extra hour wouldn’t have included any more monster action.) Though I personally liked Godzilla: King of the Monsters better, Godzilla vs. Kong was a well-done movie that delivered the goods (notably three big battle scenes between the title characters – though only sporadically did these filmmakers make the distinction Willis O’Brien did in the 1933 King Kong of having Kong act like a human prizefighter, blocking, feinting and punching, while the non-primate monsters he battled just charged like the wild beasts they were), and the big action scenes were at least a bit better lit than they were in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which to my mind made them more fun. Overall, the “Monsterverse” cycle was a perfectly decent piece of modern filmmaking that, despite a few feints at social comment, basically delivered the goods people going to see movies with the “G”- and “K”-words in their titles would expect. At least that’s how I felt about it; one imdb.com reviewer put up this bizarre post that suggested the people who like these movies don't want to see human characters in them at all: “I guarantee 99% of viewers just wanted to see two titans go at it. Nobody cared about the humans in this movie. So why does WB keep trying to force humans down our throats in these movies? In an hour and 50-ish minutes we’re forced to watch people for 80 of those minutes. There’s way too much time trying to make a plot here that I don’t want to see.”

Picture Perfect Lies (Maple Island Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last Sunday I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime, including a “premiere” of a film called Picture Perfect Lies, whose title is a pun on the fact that an old photo the heroine discovers gives her a big clue that helps her find out her real identity. The heroine is Rachel Collins (Megan Elizabeth Barker, who’s 28 years old but is supposed to be playing a teenager who as the story begins is having her 16th birthday party), who is there with her parents (Matthew Pohlkamp and Lifetime regular Laurie Fortier) and her aunt Jenny (Crystal Allen – which, ironically, was also the name of the Joan Crawford character in the 1939 film The Women). At the party Jenny tells Rachel that she’s about to give her the deep, dark secret of who she really is and where she came from, and just as both Rachel and we are being led to believe that it’s going to turn out Rachel was really Jenny’s daughter and the Collinses passed Jenny off as Rachel’s aunt when she was really her mom, Jenny falls and dies. At first everyone believes this was an accident – including us, since we’ve seen her carrying a flask and slipping alcohol into her ginger ale – until one of the police called to investigate the death finds a golf club with Jenny’s blood on it and they immediately assume she was murdered with it.

Rachel’s parents go hog wild installing new security systems inside the home, including bars on all the windows and security cameras in every room. They tell Rachel it’s to protect her from the unknown killer who knocked off Aunt Jenny, but Rachel gets suspicious, especially when she finds a photo Jenny had been keeping all these years of a little blonde girl at age four posed outdoors at a location called Echo Lake Park. Rachel and her boyfriend Brett (Jordan Frechtman), who looks something like Donny Osmond auditioning for a biopic of Elvis, go on the trail and manage to escape the attempts of Rachel’s (presumed) parents to hold her captive. Through the Internet they learn that Echo Lake Park is in Colorado and they drive from the L.A. area where this story started through Utah and into Colorado, where they learn [spoiler alert!] that Rachel’s real name was “Rebecca Tomlinson” and she was stolen from her real parents in Colorado by Jenny. It seems Mrs. Collins wanted a kid, and not being able either to conceive one au naturel or adopt through legitimate channels (the adoption agencies she went to all turned her down), she sent Jenny out literally shopping for a baby for her.

The photo Rachel discovered was essentially the sample picture Jenny snapped candidly and sent to the Collinses to get the O.K. that she should go ahead and kidnap her, and Jenny did it but never got over the guilt feelings about it. Rachel and Brett learned this by tracking down the guy Jenny dated in high school – who turned out to be a schlub with a menial job as groundskeeper in a city park – who remembered her as a bright, vivacious girl instead of the neurotic guilt-ridden drunk Rachel had known growing up. At her sweet 16 party Jenny had planned to tell Rachel the true story of where she came from and how she had got into the Collins family – only she and her sister got into an argument about it and sis clubbed her over the head with the golf implement so she couldn’t tell Rachel, then essentially turned the house into a prison to keep Rachel from escaping and finding out the truth on her own. Though handicapped by the casting of a 28-year-old woman as a 16-year-old girl, and also by the sheer preposterousness of the plot (wouldn’t the Tomlinsons have gone out looking for their daughter, and wouldn’t an amateur kidnapper like Jenny probably have left a trail a mile wide that would make it easy to apprehend her?), Picture Perfect Lies – directed by old Lifetime hand John Murlowski from a script by Rebeca Hughes and Samuel Hayes – is actually quite good. It’s highlighted by a marvelous performance by Laurie Fortier, who carefully calibrates her performance from apparently loving mother to vicious monster throughout the movie and does her best to make this hard-to-swallow plot believable – even though Lifetime’s promos, which showed her in full cry declaiming to poor Rachel, “I raised you! I’m your mother!”, rather gave the game away.

Secrets in the Snow (Almost Never Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

After Picture Perfect Lies Lifetime showed a year-old movie called Secrets in the Snow which, if anything, had an even more outrageous and unbelievable switcheroo at the end than Picture Perfect Lies. This time the heroine is Christina (Aubrey Reynolds), who lives in Chicago, works as a social worker and for the last three months has been dating Ted Ryant (Travis Caldwell). Ted came from a small town in the snow country (one presumes, given that Chicago was the city he escaped to, it was in either Minnesota or Wisconsin) where his dad Johnathan (Peter Carey) owns a “cider mill” (I didn’t know what that was but it’s a mill for crushing apples to turn them into cider, juice or various “hard” beverages that can be made from apple juice) that’s been in the Ryant family for generations. These days, however, he spends virtually all his time in his house’s basement building models of World War II airplanes (including the Focke-Wulf FW 190, the most fearsome fighter the Luftwaffe had) while his wife Katherine pretty much runs the household. Ted is driving back to wherever from Chicago for Katherine’s annual birthday party, which is usually held at a local tavern (one gag in Patrick Powell’s script is the town is so small that every time someone asks for directions, they’re told, “It’s just down the street”) but this year is going to be at the Ryant home because a ferocious snowstorm is literally keeping people “snowed in.”

Christina quickly notices that there are unspoken secrets among the Ryants, who include Ted’s sister Nicole (Dana Simone) and a rather twitchy guy named Jacob (Russell Bradley Fenton) whose relation to the Ryants wasn’t clear – I would have thought he was a blood Ryant but Powell’s dialogue carefully specified that he wasn’t; then I assumed he was Nicole’s husband (and therefore a Ryant in-law) but they seemed awfully remote for a married couple even in a family that, as I joked during the movie, made Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” seem like a bundle of laughs by comparison. Most of the angst revolves around the mysterious death of Tim’s brother Paul, who fell through the ice on a frozen-over lake two years previously and drowned. HIs death was ruled an accident but some of the Ryants, particularly Nicole, are convinced he was murdered even though they don’t know by whom or why. Things come to a head when Paul’s ex-girlfriend Bonnie (Liz Fenning) shows up – incidentally imdb.com lists her character name as “Angie” but I specifically remember hearing “Bonnie” on the soundtrack, and the name stuck largely because it was the name of my maternal grandmother – courtesy of a mysterious power blackout that has made it impossible for her to stay at her own home without heat or electricity. Christina launches a ham-handed attempt to use her social-work skills on the Ryants and the others, but things backfire big-time. Her calls for everyone to be honest with each other and let go of their secrets provoke Bonnie into admitting that she had an affair with someone else while Paul was still alive, though like a typical American either in movies or in life she felt horrendously guilty afterwards and said it was the worst thing she’d ever done in her life.

After the mephitic closeness imposed upon them by the rotten weather – and Bonnie’s sudden flight to her own home because she’d rather stay there and freeze than endure the hatred and scorn from the Ryants – we get the big reversal [spoiler alert!]: the man Bonnie had the affair with was Paul’s brother Ted, the same man Christina was dating and who brought her into the Ryants’ orbit. What’s more, Ted is still in love with Bonnie and wants her permanently. Just how he thought showing up with another girlfriend was able to win her back remains a mystery, but the rather bland character Travis Caldwell has been playing suddenly becomes a psycho monster who reveals he murdered Paul because Paul stood in the way of him getting together with Bonnie (and of course Powell throws out an obligatory reference to Cain and Abel, though he seems to think Cain killed Abel over a woman instead of jealousy that Abel had won God’s favor and Cain hadn’t). One reason I wasn’t expecting this plot twist is that Taylor Caldwell is easy on the eyes and reasonably attractive but not the drop-dead gorgeous sex magnet Lifetime usually casts as its young male villains. Another reason is that Lifetime almost never tries to make one-half of the young ingénue couple the killer; usually their audience expects them to stay together after someone else in the dramatis personae has tried to kill either or both of them. José Montesinos directed Secrets in the Snow and got some nice Gothic touches into it – notably the opening shot, which shows Paul’s definitely decayed but still relatively intact hand and forearm poking through the whole in the iced-over lake – but he’s at the mercy of Powell’s script, which once you realize that Ted is the killer ends the way you’d expect, with Ted menacing Christina until she gets away from him and his momentum propels him through the same sort of weak spot in the ice over the lake so he drowns just as his brother did. Secrets in the Snow had some nicely macabre bits – it was more engaging than the bare synopsis makes it sound – but it still was hardly Lifetime at its best, or even at its median level of attractive trashiness.

Sitting Pretty (Paramount, 1933)

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

The night Charles and I watched Godzilla vs. Kong the movie ended soon enough that I was able to run something else for us afterwards, a grey-label DVD of a quite engaging 1933 Paramount musical called Sitting Pretty. Not to be confused with the 1948 20th Century-Fox Sitting Pretty, which was the first film to introduce Clifton Webb’s “Mr. Belvedere” character, this Sitting Pretty was a comedy-musical starring Jack Oakie and Jack Haley as Chick Parker and Pete Pendleton. They work at a song-publishing company on New York’s famous Tin Pan Alley (which got that name from the joke that the sound of all those aspiring songwriters and song demonstrators playing all those out-of-tune pianos at once sounded like a whole bunch of people pounding on tin), and in his spare time Chick is constantly borrowing money from his co-workers and losing it on crap games. (Today he’d be considered a gambling addict.) With Chick as the composer and Pete as the lyricist, they come up with a song that’s an actual hit, “I Want to Meander with Miranda” (the real-life songwriting team of Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, who wrote the score for this film, must have had a lot of fun with their tongues firmly in their cheeks to write the dorky and awkward but appealing ditties this film is full of). They get $300, which Pete wants to use for the two to travel to Hollywood where they’ve been told the big money is, but of course Chick loses all but $15 of it in his latest dice game and they have to hitchhike to L.A. on what they have left.

Along the way they meet several characters, including a middle-aged couple who throw them out of their car when “I Wanna Meander with Miranda” comes on the radio and Chick and Pete boast that they wrote it – it turns out they always hated that song – and a lunch-wagon owner named Dorothy (Ginger Rogers in the last film of her apprenticeship; in her next movie, Flying Down to Rio, she’d dance for the first time with Fred Astaire … and the rest, as they say, is history) who comes to Hollywood with Chick, Pete and Dorothy’s kid brother Buzz (Jerry Tucker, who gets to take advantage of being able to play a child character as a tough-minded brat before Shirley Temple’s great success a year later forced every movie kid of either gender into her gooey-sweet mold). They’ve got it made – or at least they think they do – when a movie producer named Jules Clark writes them a check for $100 and promises them a contract, but then he turns out to be a nut who’d been furloughed from a mental institution and was pretending to be a rich man and to run a studio. (The imdb.com cast list for this film credits old silent-era star Lew Cody with playing Jules Clark, but it’s not clear whether he’s the crazy guy or the real Jules Clark of Acme Studios,who appears later in the action.) They end up living in what would then have been called a “tourist camp” but would now be a “motel” run by Tannenbaum (Gregory Ratoff), who doubles as an agent. At this point there’s a great number set in and around the neighborhood that features women with women, men with men, and two naked ladies taking a shower – they were probably wearing body stockings but you could still see their nipples, definitely marking this as part of the so-called “pre-Code” period of relatively loose enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code.

By impersonating Tannenbaum, Chick and Pete bluff their way into a job at Acme – the sight of the real Jules Clark trying to have five different conversations at once is an appealing gag – and they get the assignment to write songs for Acme’s biggest (and predictably diva-esque) star, Gloria Duval (Thelma Todd). Our grey-label DVD glitched here and we missed a few minutes of the movie, but we didn’t have any trouble figuring out what happened next: Chick “goes Hollywood” in a big way, buying a huge house and a fancy car, and starting an affair with Duval even though it’s plain old Dorothy at home whom he really loves. Then Chick starts missing deadlines and showing up late for work, and the real Jules Clark fires him. There’s a nice grim scene in which Pete visits Chick just as the repossessors show up at his fancy house and take every stick of furniture inside it, ending up by taking his piano and thereby leaving Chick no way to finish his new song. They go out to a speakeasy (Sitting Pretty was made during the last dregs of Prohibition) and order various drinks, leaving different amounts of liquid in each one so it will sound the right notes to play Chick’s song. As they get more and more drunk they meet an equally sloshed fellow customer who turns out to be Morris Vinton (Hale Hamilton), the biggest director at the rival Superba Studios. With all three sloshed to the gills, Chick and Pete end up at the lavish mansion of the Superba head, where Morris is being given a party in his honor, complete with a harpist playing an instrumental version of Oscar Rasbach’s setting of Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” – and yes, that’s as ghastly and pretentious as it sounds.

Ultimately it ends as you’d expect it to, with Morris hiring Chick and Pete to write songs for his next big movie and Dorothy (ya remember Dorothy?) to star. The film is represented by a big production number directed by Larry Ceballos in full Busby Berkeley style – Ceballos had actually come out to Hollywood before Berkeley did and had done dance numbers for big early Warner Bros. musicals like On With the Show and the now mostly-lost Gold Diggers on Broadway, but once Berkeley himself switched from Goldwyn to Warners, the Warner brothers lost interest in Ceballos. He actually sued them when they took him off the job of dance direction for Footlight Parade and put Berkeley on it, though my source didn’t give the outcome of his lawsuit, and he turned up here with an apparent chip on his shoulder and a determination to show he could do this sort of big number just as well as Berkeley could. It’s set to the song “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?,” the one song from this film that has become a standard (and I suspect the Paramount executives were aware it was the best song in the film and the one most likely to become a hit, since they used an instrumental version under the opening credits) – though given that I learned this song from Bing Crosby’s hit record I’d always assumed it was from one of his films. We get a stentorian Irish tenor singing the song to Ginger Rogers, who does a few nondescript dance moves, before the camera takes us into the rafters and the chorus girls are filmed from overhead doing interesting things with fans. (Charles was surprised that they could get away with showing a fan dance on film even in the relative freedom of the “pre-Code” era, though a year after this – just under the wire before the Legion of Decency, a Roman Catholic pressure group whose name says it all, forced Hollywood to get serious about enforcing the Code – Paramount put Sally Rand as a guest star in the film Bolero and billed her as “doing her famous Fan Dance.”) There’s a bit of a surprise at the end, after the big number, when Chick tells Dorothy she’d be better off marrying Pete than him – and Dorothy agrees and tells him she and Pete already got married two weeks earlier.

Directed by Harry Joe Brown – who got the rare honor of having his name appear on the credits in cursive script – from a script by a writing committee (Nina Wilcox Putnam and an uncredited Harry Stoddard, story; Jack McGowan, Lou Breslow and the redoubtable S. J. Perelman, screenplay) Sitting Pretty is one of those movies that simultaneously exploits typical movie clichés and makes fun of them. It’s a movie that’s pretty predictable but still a lot of fun, even though during the final number Fred Astaire could have come in, whirled Ginger Rogers into his arms and made this already fine movie even better. But then this was Paramount, which had famously tested Fred Astaire in 1928 and said of him, “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.”