Deadly Yoga Retreat (ZMA Films, Mauiwood, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, after two better-than-average movies last night Lifetime reverted to the usual silliness for their third film of the night, the “premiere” of a piece of kinky trash called Deadly Yoga Retreat. This is a sort of follow-up to an earlier Lifetime movie from 2020 called Psycho Yoga Instructor, which when I posted to moviemagg about it I joked that it sounded like a bunch of Lifetime writers had got together and brainstormed, “What’s the stupidest title a Lifetime movie could have?” I even found myself wondering whether the lead characters in Psycho Yoga Instructor and Deadly Yoga Retreat were supposed to be the same person, especially since the villain in Psycho Yoga Instructor had escaped and fled the scene of his crimes to set up shop elsewhere. Both films were made by the same writer-director team, Brian Herzlinger and Robert Black (Herzlinger got sole directorical credit but split the writing credits with Black), so it’s possible they meant Deadly Yoga Retreat to be a sequel even though different actors play the villains in each: Panos Vlahos in Psycho Yoga Instructor and Jonathan Bennett (whom we’re told is drop-dead gorgeous but is only ordinarily attractive) in Deadly Yoga Retreat.

Deadly Yoga Retreat starts at an island waterfall with a young woman at the top and a young man at the bottom. He’s trying to coax her to jump off the cliff into the water and she’s pleading with him to climb up instead – which he can’t because he’s afraid of heights. Since the noise of the waterfall drowns them out whenever they try to communicate, he’s left helpless to do something about it when a stranger sneaks behind him and slashes her throat, causing her blood to trickle down the waterfall as she dies. (That’s about the limit of creative direction from Brian Herzlinger in this movie.) Then we meet the leads of our story, Isabella Miller (Danielle C. Ryan) and her husband Patrick (Eric Gillom), who’s totally bald in a way that reminded me of Lex Luthor or Cueball. Isabella is disaffected with her life because she gave up her career as a yoga teacher five years before at the urging of her husband, who wanted her to attend law school and ultimately practice as an attorney, when she receives a letter and an information packet announcing that she’s been accepted to a weekend retreat in Hawai’i under yoga teacher Remington “Remy” Morrow (Jonathan Bennett). Once she arrives with her best friend Pam (Sara Ashley Rodriguez) in tow – Pam is described as single after two failed marriages and she falls in lust with Remy at first sight – Isabella finds out that Remy runs the place like a yoga boot camp, driving the students hard and sending them back home if they don’t measure up to his high standards.

Of course we learn that he’s more than just legitimately tough: when he confronts his first victim, Nina (Ashley Brinkman), after she can’t hold a pose in practice, he first comes on to her and, when she insists that she’s in love with her husband and not interested in any extra-relational activity he brutally strangles her and leaves it to his point person at the resort, Jeffrey (Vene Chun), to dispose of the body. Later another woman at the retreat actually agrees to have sex with Remy to avoid getting cut from the class – only he double-crosses her and, when she objects, he strangles her, too. By the time he’s done Remy has murdered four people, including one woman he selects for a special honor: to climb up the local mountain and do yoga at the summit. Along with Isabella and Pam, Remy selects Lisa (Jennifer Rikert Wolski) for this honor even though Lisa has only one lung and so she’s sorely taxed by the ultra-thin air on the mountaintop. At one point Lisa insists she can’t go on, and Remy sends Isabella and Pam away to see if they find a live spot for cell-phone service even though Remy had previously told them the entire mountain was a dead spot. Too late they realize that Remy sent them off on this fool’s errand just so he’d be left alone long enough to murder Lisa, and when Isabella finally realizes she’s in mortal danger from her (dare I say it?) psycho yoga instructor, she flees and he yells at her that he knows the mountain far better than she does and so she won’t be able to get away from him. Eventually, however, she’s able to kill Remy with a pickaxe a forestry crew on the mountain has conveniently left behind, though not before Remy has fatally stabbed Pam (one plot twist I could have done without).

At the end all the bodies have been placed in plastic bags and Isabella is reunited with Patrick, even though he’s no great prize – maybe it’s just because his total baldness reminded me of comic-book villains like Luthor or Cueball, but I never liked him and wished she could have landed something better than a bald guy or a psycho crook. Deadly Yoga Retreat is marked by the incredible seriousness with which Brian Herzlinger stages the utter trash he and Robert Black concocted, and aside from one scene in which Remy says that at age 12 he asked his mother’s drug-dealing boyfriend to stop giving her drugs, and got beaten up by the boyfriend and told by his mom that he shouldn’t do anything to upset him again, that’s the only clue we get as to What Made Remy Run – a far cry from the complexity with which Jason-Shane Scott drew the villains in Abduction Runs in the Family.

Ellery Queen: "The Adventure of the Sinister Scenario" (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, NBCX-TV, 1976)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles was willing to stay up late last night long enough to watch a reasonably short movie – about an hour or so – so I ran us an episode of the 1975-1976 Ellery Queen TV show, “The Adventure of the Sinister Scenario.” As I’ve noted before in my previous posts on the 1930’s and 1940’s movies featuring him, “Ellery Queen” was the fictional creation of writers Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee, who not only wrote stories about a fictional detective named “Ellery Queen” but made himself the nominal author as well – though I was startled to find while looking up my old moviemagg posts on the character that “Frederick Dnnnay” and “Manfred Lee” were themselves pseudonyms. “Dannay’s” real name was Daniel Nathan and “Lee’s” was Emmanuel Benjamin Napofsky. This series was produced by Richard Levinson and William Link, whose huge success with the series (and the character) Columbo led to their becoming the go-to guys for TV mystery series at Universal in the 1970’s. Among their bright ideas was a series about Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe (with Willian Conrad playing him) and one on Ellery Queen, set in the late 1940’s (you can tell from the great blunderbusses of cars the people drive around in, the women’s fashions and the movie stars, including Dorothy Lamour and Alice Faye, Ellery Queen (Jim Hutton) and his father, New York City police inspector Richard Queen (David Wayne, who has the interesting distinction of having been in more movies with Marilyn Monroe – five – than any other of her co-stars), are hoping to meet on their visit to Hollywood.

They’re there to watch the making of a new movie based on one of Ellery Queen’s novels, with an egomaniac, philandering actor named Gilbert Mallory (an aging Troy Donahue, considerably older and less attractive than Jim Hutton!) as Ellery and Lionel Briggs (Noah Beery, Jr., considerably older and less attractive than he’d been in The Crimson Canary and other vest-pocket thrillers and comedies for Universal 30 years earlier) as his dad. For some reason the “real” Ellery Queen doesn’t resent being played by a long-in-the-tooth actor who’s visibly older than he, but the real Richard Queen does. During the first act we see Mrs. Gilbert Mallory (her first name is Claire and she’s played quite authoritatively by Barbara Rush) confront her husband’s latest girlfriend de jour, Pamela Courtney (Susan Damante) in his dressing room. I was amused that Charles and I had just seen that particular scene – a confrontation between an actor’s wife and his paramour in his dressing room – in the 1929 Paramount film The Studio Murder Mystery. It all becomes academic, though, since at the end of act one Gilbert Mallory is shot dead in a scene in which he was supposed to shoot at with a blank-loaded gun but into which someone sneaked live rounds instead.

There’ve been all too many recent incidents in which that’s happened for real, from the death of Brandon Lee (Bruce Lee’s son) in 1993 while filming what was hoped would be his star-making movie, The Crow, to the recent contretemps in New Mexico in October 2021 when a prop gun fired a live round on the set of Rust, a cheap Western starring Alec Baldwin, and killed the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins. As usual in this type of movie, there are plenty of suspects – Gil Mallory was one of those characters beloved of mystery writers who gives plenty of people reasons to hate his guts – including the film’s director, Michael Raynor (Vincent Price), as well as the wife, the girlfriend, prop department head Al Garvin (Jack Murdock), Gil’s stunt double Mike Hewitt (James Sikking) and the film’s publicist, Dave Pierce (Don DeFore). Vincent Price serves the same purpose in this film as George Zucco did in the 1941 Columbia “B” Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring: he offers suave villainy and turns in a reliably professional performance even though his character is just a red herring. Raynor is in career trouble because he’s coming off three flops and, when he chews out Gil in front of the rest of the cast and crew,Gil serves notice that he put up his own money to make the film and therefore he owns half the picture and can fire Raynor any time he wants to. Even after Gil’s death, his widow Claire makes the same threat to Raynor.

Then stunt double Mike Hewitt also gets killed when the brakes go out on the car he’s supposed to drive as Gil’s double, and the ensuing crash is fatal. As in the very first Ellery Queen movie, The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) – also set in California via a vacation Ellery is supposedly taking in the Golden State – the response of the official L.A. police detectives in charge of the case, Captain Benjamin Blake (Paul Fix, yet another veteran character actor from Hollywood’s golden age) and Lt. Braden (Paul Carr). Is to arrest all the suspects, one after the other, in the apparent hope one of them will turn out to be the guilty party. Ellery Queen deduces that [spoiler alert!] the real target of the murder was Mike Hewitt, not Gil Mallory, and the killer was Dave Pierce, who was being blackmailed by Hewitt (thoiugh if we were ever told what Hewitt had on him, it sailed over my head) and wanted to eliminate him in a wayu that would look like an accident – only Mallory turned down a double for the sequence in which he was supposed to be “shot” and thereby took the bullet intended for his double.

The most interesting aspect of this download, published by an outfit called “Fuzzy Memories” that obviously was dubbed from someone’s VHS (or maybe Beta) recording of the show as it was aired in Chicago on August 8, 1976 (actually a rerun from the original air date of February 8, 1976), is that it included all the original commercials. In fact, there was an oddly schizoid effect in that YouTube was also cutting in with modern commercials, and the dichotomy only proved that the more commercials have changed, the more they have stayed the same. Towards the end there was a cut-in from NBC’s news department, with Edwin Newman delivering information about the just-completed Democratic convention and the yet-to-occur Republican one – and the most fascinating part of the story was that President Gerald Ford had spoken to a Roman Catholic church audience and stressed his commitment to “the sanctity of life” – which was code word for opposition to abortion. So just 3 ½ years after Roe v. Wade opposition to abortion was already a bedrock position of the Republican Party in Presidential politics!

Live at the Belly Up: Dawes. (Belly Up Tavern, San Diego State University, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago my husband Charles and I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode featuring a band called Dawes. I hadn’t realized that they’ve been around for about a decade, and they stemmed from an earlier band called Simon Dawes featuring a lead guitarist and co-songwriter named Blake Mills. When Mills bailed from the band in the early 2010’s the remaining members, singer/guitarist Taylor Goldsmith and his brother Griffin Goldsmith on drums, reorganized as Dawes and abandoned the earlier incarnation’s punk sound for what the official publicity describes as “ the Laurel Canyon sound with their Americana, folk and rock sounds” – though I hear almost nothing of the 1970’s Laurel Canyon scene of Crosby, Stills and Nash or Joni Mitchell in their music. The only songs they did that sounded remotely like that were two numbers featuring Taylor Goldsmith on acoustic guitar, “Moon in the Water” (which Taylor played and sang solo) and “Crack the Case” (which brought in the band playing softly behind him). Otherwise, Dawes emerges as a straightforward rock band, the kind of sound you’d expect from the people Taylor Goldsmith mentioned as his influences in his interviews: Bob Dylan, The Band (jointly and severally, I presume), Bruce Springsteen and Warren Zevon, who was on the fringes of the Laurel Canyon scene (he was signed to Asylum Records and Linda Ronstadt covered some ol his songs) but really wasn’t a part of it because his imagination was way too dark.

Dawes performed a series of quite good songs including the single from their very first album, “From a Window Seat,” as well as the single from their 2021 album release, “Who Do You Think You’re Talking To?” (It’s from their album Good Luck with Whatever, their most recent release, though they have another one scheduled to come out in July.) Besides the two acoustic tracks and the first two songs mentioned above, the band played “Mistakes We Should Have Made,” “To Be Completely Honest,” “When the Tequila Runs Out (We’ll Be Drinking Champagne),” “Until My Time Comes,” “None of My Business,” and “A Little Bit of Everything.” If you get the impression from these titles that Taylor Goldsmith has a wry sense of humor and a somewhat cynical but still loving view of relationships, you’d be right. In fact, what impressed both Charles and I about Dawes’ music was the quality of the songwriting; both melodically and lyrically, these are songs that know where they are going and are the products of a musical mind that knows just where he wants to take us. Dawes turned out to be a pleasant surprise, well worth listening to and getting to know.

Miss Susie Slagle's (Paramount, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.n, yesterday I ran a quite engaging movie from one of my grey-label sources – it was obviously dubbed from a VHS tape of a commercial TV station: I could tell because whoever recorded the tape had tried to edit it on the fly – called Miss Susie Slagle’s. It was one of Paramount’s attempts to make a major star out of Bowen Charleston Tufts III, professionally known as Sonny Tufts, who had originally trained as an opera singer and had been good enough to audition for the Met (though that’s hard to believe based on the brief bit of warbling he does here), Then he had a brief career on Broadway and was scouted by Paramount, who put him in an all-star wartime melodrama called So Proudly We Hail! (with the exclamation point), produced and directed by Mark Sandrich (best known for having directed five of the 10 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies) from a script by Adrian Scott based on the indignities visited on American Army nurses by the dastardly Japanese when they invaded and conquered the Philippines in the early days of World War II. Tufts played a GI named “Kansas” and was sufficiently hunky that Paramount got letters from moviegoers asking them to show more of him. Paramount obliged with a series of awkwardly thrown-together vehicles, and when audiences got tired of him and his marriage to actress Barbara Dane broke up, his career descended ti dreck like the 1953 film Cat Women on the Moon. He eventually drank himself to death at age 58 in 1970.

Tufts’ name became a running gag for Johnny Carson in his years hosting The Tonight Show, and he was so synonymous with bad acting that in their 1979 book The Golden Turkey Awards, authors Harry and Michael Medved (back when Michael was still writing intentionally silly books about bad movies instead of unintentionally silly books about how Hollywood had been taken over and corrupted by liberal elites) devoted an entire chapter to “The Worst Performance by Sonny Tufts.” I first heard of Miss Susie Slagle’s from a Films in Review article in 1971 on its director, John Berry, who was blacklisted as part of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 and went to France to continue his career, though unlike fellow expat Joseph Losey, Berry did occasionally return to the U.S. to work once the blacklist was lifted in the early 1960’s. Berry was a protégé of Orson Welles and John Houseman – reportedly Welles encouraged him to take up directing instead of (or as well as) acting and Houseman is named as an associate producer on this film – and Miss Susie Slagle’s was his first feature film as a director. It was based on a novel by Augusta Tucker called Miss Susie Slagel’s – obviously the spelling was changed for the film because World War II was still going on and Paramount’s “suits” wanted a less German-sounding name for a sympathetic character.

The film was scripted by Hugo Butler, Anne Froelich and Adrian Scott (the last of whom was one of the “Hollywood 10” and a fellow blacklistee of director Berry), and was set in Baltimore in the year 1910 (though my husband Charles noticed an outdoor scene in which palm trees are clearly visible). An opening title tells us that Miss Susie Slagle herself (Lillian Gish, whose presence adds dignity to this movie even though she’s playing a pretty standard nice old materfamilias) was the object of concern among her neighbors when her parents died and left her that big old house, but she responded by turning it into a boarding house for male medical students at the newly opened medical schoon just down the street. As the film opens she’s in her 40th year of operating the boarding house and she takes great pride in the quality of the medical students who have passed through her doors on their way to becoming doctors. She also takes great pride in the fact that no one who lived at Miss Susie Slagle’s has ever flunked out. Miss Susie Slagle has a Black manservant who cooks for her and her residents, and makes sure to call them all “Doctor” even though they keep pointing out to him that they haven’t earned that title yet.

The film focuses on three medical students in particular: Elijah Howe, Jr. (Bill Edwards), whose father Dr. Elijah Howe, Sr. (Ray Collins, another person involved in this movie besides director Berry who had an Orson Welles connection), is the medical director of the college and casts an insufferably long shadow over his son; Ben Mead (Billy De Wolfe), who has lived his entire life in China as the son of a white missionary and as soon as he has his medical degree wants to go back there and practice; and St. George “Pug” Prentice (Sonny Tufts), whose father, also a doctor, left him alone with a terminally ill four-year-old boy and gave him a phobia about being around sick people because he watched the kid die and could do nothing to help him. Needless to say, this causes him quite a few inconveniences being a medical student, including one bizarre scene in which he bolts in the middle of an operation Dr. Faber (Morris Carnovsky – imdb.com lists his character as “Dr. Fletcher” but I distinctly heard the name “Faber” on the soundtrack) is performing in one of those preposterous amphitieatres in which surgeons do operations on real patients while medical students watch and hopefully learn. In this case Pug bolts the room because he’s convinced the patient will die, and he only learns she didn’t when the fellow medical students return to Miss Susie Slagle’s excited by the miraculous recovery Dr. Faber pulled in that operating room.

Pug also meets his girlfriend Margaretta Howe (Joan Caulfield), Elijah, Jr.’s sister, when Elijah gets drunk on a post-school outing to a bar (it’s hard to watch this movie and not think that within a decade all the bars and saloons would be forced to close due to Prohibition) and Pug and Margaretta run into each other for a classic Hollywood “meet-cute.” Meanwhile, Ben Mead falls for woman medical student Nan Rogers (Veronica Lake, reunited with Tufts from the cast of So Proudly We Hail! even though there’s virtually no interaction between them, and since this film takes place in 1910 Lake is obliged to wear her hair swept up rather than over one eye, as was her trademark in films with contemporary settings).One wonders where she is training and also where she is living, since Miss Susie Slagle’s is strictly stag. Ben and Nan even get married along the way despite the unwritten rule that medical students are not supposed to marry until they get their degrees and become full-fledged doctors. That proves to be a key plot development as a diphtheria epidemic sweeps through the community, and Ben gets a lachrymose death scene while Pug, true to form, walks out on him – and even though her husband has croaked, Nan determines to go to China anyway and do whatever she can to bring Western medicine to the benighted Chinese (at least by the plot assumptions of this movie – don’t get me started on traditional Chinese medicine and the things I think it gets right that Western medicine gets wrong, as well as the things Western medicine gets right that Chinese medicine gets wrong).

Meanwhile, Elijah Howe, Jr. has stormed out of his father’s house and moved in at Miss Susie Slagle’s, where the supportive camaraderie has a wonderful effect on his grades: while still living under Daddy’s roof (and thumb) he was on the verge of flunking out, but once he’s in a less pressured environment his grades take a turn for the better even though he disappoints his father by opting to specialize in pathology, presumably so he wouldn’t have to deal with any living patients. And Pug gets his redemption when as part of the medical school’s on-the-job training, he’s sent out on a call to a desperate mother who’s about to give birth to her third child – in perhaps the best line of the film she glumly tells him that no matter how often she gives birth, the experience never gets easier. Of course she has a crisis on the table (actually in her own bed), and Pug has to overcome his fears to bring both her and her newborn out safely. Miss Susie Slagle’s is actually a pretty good movie – its plot is a collection of interlocking story strands (a structure we’ve become almost too familiar with from modern TV shows) and all of them are pretty clichéd and predictable, but they move effectively to their predestined resolutions.

One thing about this movie that isn’t surprising is the quiet dignity of Lillian Gish’ who even in this trite story that no doubt had her wishing that D. W. Griffith were still active (he was alive in 1942 but no longer making movies, though Gish’s perception of his importance to her career is indicated by the title she chose for her autobiography: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me), carries the dignity and grace that were part of her on-screen personality and gives the role a quiet strength. One surprise I wasn’t expecting was the capable acting of Sonny Tufts: the man whose name has become a synonym for bad acting here turns ini a quite reasonable performance. Yes, there were people around in 1945 who could have played this role better – like John Garfield (who was still a Warner Bros. contract player, though later he would become independent and John Berry would direct his last film, He Ran All the Way) or Paramount’s own Alan Ladd) – but Tufts, who in some of his close-ups has a striking resemblance to the young Elvis (also a movie performer who got a lot of unfair dissing, though in Elvis’s case it was mostly due to the crappy roles Col. Tom Parker kept putting him in), delivers a perfectly reasonable performance. He doesn’t light up the screen the way Garfield or Ladd would have, but he’s not embarrassingly bad either – and anyone whose total knowledge of Tufts’ acting skills is based on Cat Women on the Moon and the other trash he did after Paramount let him go is due for a surprise here.

Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring (Columbia, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I fished through the YouTube collection of “B” mysteries last night and ended up watching the film Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring, which was O.K. but not on the level of the other Ellery Queen movies we’d been watching lately. This film was part of a “B” series at Columbia with Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen (later replaced by William Gargan); Charley “Uncle Henry” Grapewin as Ellery’s father, Inspector Queen of the New York Police Department (I seem to recall from somewhere that his first name was “Richard” but was never so referred to in these movies); and Margaret Lindsay freed from her former contract at Warner Bros., where she was usually cast as the “good girl” to Bette Davis’s “bad girl.” (Alas, her most famous post-Warners credit would be in Universal’s 1942 version of Rex Beach’s The Spoilers, in which she was once again the “good girl,” this time to Marlene Dietrich, wno not only played the “bad girl” but got the film’s male lead, John Wayne.)

This time around the “murder ring” isn’t what you might think – a sort of Murder, Incorporated gang of killers who would “off” anybody for a fee – but the dysfunctional Stack family: matriarch Augusta Stack (Blanche Yurka, a major stage star who made surprisingly few films; she seems to have been the next “name” producers and casting directors called if they couldn’t get Maria Ouspenskaya) and her two adult children, John (Leon Ames, surprisingly good as suave villainy just three years before he played Judy Garland’s father in Meet Me in St. Louis) and Alicia (Jean Fenwick). Thropgh the opening third of the film Augusta bullies tier kids mercilessly – Alicia in particular, whom she treats like an unpaid housemaid with such ferocity Cinderella probably had it easy by comparison. Augusta has endowed a hospital and got her name on it; she also has a love-hate relationship with the facility’s medical director, Dr. Edwin Janney (George Zucco, whose presence in this film was quite a surprise). At first she says she doesn’t trust him, to the point of demanding another surgeon for her own operation, largely because he has a way of disappearing on her during so-called “medical emergencies” which, we learn later, he stages via a secret button on his desk that activates a record player containing an authentic-sounding call summoning him to the E.R. He’s also having a dispute over intellectual property: he claims rights to a new formula he’s invented, but Augusta’s attorney quotes the contract he signed with her giving her the rights to any new treatments he invented. And yet it also turns out that Augusta has willed Dr. Janney almost all her entire fortune!

Augusta Stark wants Inspector Queen to infiltrate someone into the hospital, but she doesn’t want anybody who “looks like a detective,” so Inspector Queen sends his son Ellery to pose as a patient, and Ellery in turn asks his faithful secretary and fiancée, Nikki Porter (Margaret Lindsay), to dress as a nurse. Ellery shows up at the Stark home dressed in a suit and tie rather than anything one would expect to see a gardener (which is supposed to be his cover identity) wearing, then or now. His idea of posing as a patient is to speak in a hoarse tone and say he’s losing his voice – though of course there are plenty of times when Ellery forgets he’s supposed to be speaking in whispery tones and uses his normal voice. John Stark is in hock to a comic-relief gangster named Lou Thomas (Tom Dugan), who agrees to knock off Augusta in exchange for forgiving the debt. Only the way he tries to do that is by running Augusta’s car off the road, which results in both of them becoming injured and taken to Stark Hospital. Augusta dies on the operating table, and the death is originally ruled accidental, but a police-ordered autopsy reveals her hyoid bone was broken, and therefore she must have been strangled. Later a nurse named Miss Fox (Charlotte Wynters) is also found dead, and still later John Stark hangs himself after he realizes the real murderer is [spoiler alert!] his secret girlfriend on the nursing staff, Marian Tracy (Mona Barrie), who killed Augusta in hopes that her son would inherit her estate (which he won’t) and also killed Miss Fox because she’d stumbled on her secret.

Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring isn’t a particularly interesting film – the title promised a considerably better movie than the one we got – and it didn’t help that we were watching it in a wretched transfer on YouTube where the image so frequently swayed back and forth on screen it started looking like they had shot the fim on an ocean liner sailing through a heavy storm. The writers are Eric Taylor and Gertrude Purcell, adapting one of the “Ellery Queen” books (real-life writers Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee signed the books “Ellery Queen” to make it seem as if he were not only the “sleuth” character of the books but their author as well), and the director is James P. Hogan, an old hand at this sort of film but one who seemed to be pretty much going through the motions here.

The Studio Murder Mystery (Paramount, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles came home from work at quarter to 10 p.m. and I looked for another movie on YouTube we could watch together: a 1929 film called The Studio Murder Mystery, based in a magazine serial by a married (straight) couple billed just as “The Edgintgons.” His name was A. Channing Ediignton and hers was Carmen Ballen Edgington, and their serial was adapted for the screen by Frank Tuttlle, who also directed, though Ethel Doherty was credited with “scenario.” (More recently, in the 1960’s, a similarly named husband-and-wife team called “The Gordons” published a comic novel called Undercover Cat, which the Walt Disney Company filmed as That Darn Cat! In that case, “Gordon” was his first name as well as his last name – what were his parents thinking? – and her name was Mildred.) The style of the title indicates that the producing studio, Paramount, was trying to concoct a follow-up to their successful series of films based on Willard Huntington Wright’s “Philo Vance” character (as I’ve mentioned before, Wright wrote the Vance stories under the pseudonym “S. S. Van Dine” to combine the two things he was hoping to do more of if the Vance stories made money: eat and travel), down to using Frank Tuttle as director and copying Wright’s titling strategy for the Vance books: The ______ Murder Case, with the blank filled in by a six-letter word – only they called this one … Mystery instead of … Case so Wright wouldn’t give them any legal trouble.

This film was also apparently shot in both sound and silent versions, since imdb.com lists future producer-director-writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz as a title writer. As Charles pointed out, though the film as we have it is an all-talkie, there are some scenes which have the dull … pauses in line delivery the early sound engineers in Hollywood insisted on in the belief that no one would understand human voices recorded the way people actually talk, including interrupting each other and stepping on each other’s lines (though there were plenty of spoken-word comedy records from the 1920’s to prove that wasn’t true). Fortunately, director Tuttle chose to use quote a few overhead shots – especially in the opening reel – to alleviate the boredom induced by staging dialogue scenes in that horribly unnatural fashion, and he also had some scenes with “wild” crowd noises dubbed in, a common ploy of earl–talkie directors aiming to put some voices into films without having to re-shoot scenes that didn’t originally contain dialogue. The Studio Murder Mystery is actually a fairly intriguing story despite the longueurs of early sound production: the film casts real-life married couple Fredric March and Florence Eldridge as a married couple on screen, though their marriage is strained, to say the least, by his long history of extra-relational activities.

Narch plays Richard Hardell, and in the opening scene on Stage 10 of “Eminent Studios” (”eminent” = “paramount,” get it?) he’s being rehearsed late at night by a particularly nasty Stroheim-esque director named Rupert Borka (Warner Oland, using his Charlie Chan voice even though the character is supposed to be Eastern European, presumably Hungarian). We’re dropped the hint that he won a magazine contest to appear as the lead in Borka’s new movie, though later we get the impression that he’s been around Hollywood for a few years and has racked up at least some previous credits, both on film and in various women’s bedrooms. Borka makes it clear he doesn’t like Roicjard., doesn’t think he can act and would like to replace him, and his hatred is compounded by jealousy because Borka is convinced that one of the women Richard was having an affair with was Mrs. Borka. At present Mrs. Borka is in Europe, until Borka receives word that his wife has died and the rumor was that Richard’s name was on her lips when she died. Richard says he has a letter from Mrs. Borka that will prove to the skeptical director that he wasn’t interested in her but when Borka demands to see the letter, Richard first says it’s in his dressing room and then says it’s at his home.

Meanwhile, Richard’s dressing room is inhabited by both his latest paramour, Helen MacDonald (Doris Hill, who judging from her work here should have had more of a career than she did), and his wife Blanche (Florence Eldridge). Reversing the usual iconography of films like this, it’s Blanche who’s wearing her hair bobbed and dressed like a 1920’s vamp, while the innocent Helen – who believed Richard when he told her and Blanche were getting a divorce until Blanche basically told her he says that to all his girlfriends – has long hair and dresses in plain outfits. Eventually Richard is found stabbed to death on a deserted movie set and police detective Lt. Dirk (Eugene Pallette, yet another member of this film wio’d also been involved in the Philo Vance movies, though his character is considerably more intelligent here than in the Vance films) focuses on three main suspects: Helen, Blanche and Borka. Also involved in the proceedings are Helen’s father, the studio night watchman (Guy Oliver); Helen’s scapegrace brother Ted (Gardner James), who shows up drunk in the taxicab he drives for a living (given today’s far different attitudes towards DUI it’s amazing that his dad confiscates his flask but tells him to drive his own cab home instead of calling himself another cab); and the comic-relief part of MacDonald’s assistant, studio gatekeeper George (Chester Conklin, one of the original Keystone Kops).

The “sleuth” character is a bozo named “Tony” White (Neil Hamilton) – the quotes around the character’s first name are part of the opening credits, much like Boris Karloff’s role as “Terry” in the Universal film Graft a year later – who’s given to telling ancient jokes that weren’t all that funny to begin with and his would-be audiences keep beating him to the punch lines Given the later careers of both of them, it’s hard not to think that The Studio Murder Mystery would have been a better movie if they’d switched roles – if ht nad been Hamilton playing the scapegrace actor who’s killed in the first 15 minutes or so and March who went on to solve the crime (and, it’s h inted, end up with Helen as his live interest). But in the end, not to anybody’s surprise, it’s Borka who turns out to be the killer, and he’s successfully subdued ini a fast-motion climactic fight between him and “Tony” which was not only shot with both actors pretty obviously doubled but also was shot for the silent version, since the action is risibly fast and looks like it was shot at the 16-frames-per-second silent speed and no attempt was made to slow it down for sound. The Studio Murder Mystery seems like one of those mediocre movies with a potentially great movie trapped inside it struggling to get out, but at least the conflicts in it – between marital fidelity and extra-relational activity and between professionalism and egomania (the character of Borka is pretty obviously based on Erich von Stroheim – or at least the media image of Stroheim at the time – and it’s interesting to imagine this film with him playing Borka, and even more interesting to imagine it with Stroheim directing!) – are straightforward and the final resolution makes sense.

Sudden Danger (Allied Artists, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At about 10:20 last night I started running a movie for my husband Charles and I, a vest-pocket 1955 thriller from Allied Artists (the former Monogram) called Sudden Danger. Thje title is a bit of a misnomer because the danger the hero, blind ex-artist Wallace Curtis (Tom Drake, whose most famous credit is as the “boy next door” Jody Garland falls for in Meet Me in St. Louis), finds himself in is not “sudden” at all. He comes home one night from the Braille Institute to find the doors and windows to his apartment sealed shut, the place full of gas and his mother, who had been living with him as his caregiver, lying in bed, very dead. His mom had been the partner in a firm called Playtime Togs, which made women’s swimsuits and sports wear. Originally Wallace’s dad had been the founding partner along with Raymond Wilkins (Dayton Lummis), and from the moment Wilkins entered, alol oozing solicitous sincerity as he offered to help Wallace in any way he can, including giving him work as a commercial artist as soon as he regains his eyesight, it was obvious to me that he would turn out to be the murderer – and indeed he did, though it took a while to discern his motive.

Mrs. Curtis’s death is ruled a suicide, but Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Lt. Andy Doyle (Bill Elliott, top-billed and the screen’s first Mike Hammer in the 1953 film I, the Jury) is convinced that Wallace’s mom was really murdered and of course he initially suspects Wallace. Wallace’s only ally is the firm’s office manager and his girlfriend, Phyllis Baxter (Beverly Garland, quite a bit less effective as a good woman than as a bad one in most of her other movies). Lt. Doyle is able to collect samples of words typed on the various office typerwriters and figures out that the so-called “suicide note” Mrs. Curtis supposedly wrote before he offed herself was actually forged on one of the firm’s typewriters. He also finds out that Mrs. Curtis had an appointment with Harry Woodruff (Lyle Talbot, on the next-to-last stage of his career descent from working for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis to working for Ed Wood), na executive with a genuine fabrics company Playtime had been buying from for years. The meeting was scheduled for two days after Mrs. Curtis supposedly killed herself, and Lt. Doyle logically guesses that she wouldn’t have killed herself two days before a major appointment, especially since she’d been writing herself notes to make sure she’d remember it.

Midway through the mobile Wallace, who was blinded when he out the wrong bottle of eyedrops in his eyes (though Lt. Doyle informs him that he knows it was really his mother who did that – how did he know that?), a plot gimmick that also appeared 11 years earlier in the Lon Chaney, Jr. Inner Sanctum thriller Dead Man’s Eyes (and Chaney’s character in that film, like Tom Drake’s here, was a commercial artist before he went blind), goes through an operation in which he regains his sight. The undistinguished director of this film, Hubert Cornfeld, actually gives us the point-of-view shot the legendary Douglas Sirk should have given us in the 1953 version of Magnificent Obsession in which Wallace comes to on the operating table three weeks after the surgery and the image of his surgeon, Dr. Hastings (Ralph Gamble), gradually comes into focus. Alas, Cornfeld and the film’s writers, Daniel and Elwood Ullman (I assumed they were brothers even though they were 15 years apart in age – Daniel was born October 18, 1918 and Elwood on May 27, 1903), missed as many points as they made.

It turns out that Wilkins nas been bleeding the company dry by setting up a phony fabric company, “Regal Crest,” and writing checks to it for materials that never arrived. He’s been doing this because he’s infatuated with Vera (the electrifying Helene Stanton, playing the sort of no-good vamp character that was usually Beverly Garland’s stock in trade), a model for the company, and among other things he started embezzling to lavish the money on her. But it’s unclear whether the jewelry Wilkins has given Vera is the same as the pieces Wallace remembers his mother having, which she intended to pass down to him as heirlooms, and also in the final shoot-out between Wallace, Lt. Doyle and Wlikins, the lights go out but writers make no mention that Wallace, having recently had the experience of being blind, would be right at home in the dark and find it less of a handicap than it was for the sighted characters. It’s a good thing that the final sequence takes place largely in the dark because it’s the only sequence that looks noir, however much the movie counts as film noir thematically (though the theme of the vampy woman leading the decent but weak and sexually driven man into crime is also hinted at by the writers rather than fully developed). Still, Sudden Danger is a quite good, workmanlike thriller, and if Bill Elliott’s character gets a bit overbearing at times, at least this is one film that depicts professionally credentialed law enforcement as dogged h eroes instead of inicompetent dolts!