Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Bros., 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 6) at 9:15 p.m. Turner Classic Movies showed the film Gold Diggers of 1933 as part of their “31 Days of Oscar” salute. Last night they did a mini-tribute to the so-called “pre-Code” era of American filmmaking from 1930 to 1934, when the Production Code was already in effect but was far more loosely enforced than it was after 1934, when as part of a concerted campaign against so-called “dirty movies” in general and Mae West in particular, the U.S. branch of the Roman Catholic Church formed a pressure group called the “Legion of Decency” (which says it all) and browbeat the studios into strictly enforcing the Code. Gold Diggers of 1933 began life as a 1918 play by Avery Hopwood called The Gold Diggers, which premiered on Broadway in 1922 after a tryout three years earlier in Atlantic City and was a big enough success that Warner Bros. bought the movie rights and filmed it in 1923 as a silent starring Hope Hampton (who’s been advanced as one of the real-life prototypes, along with Marion Davies and would-be opera singer Ganna Walska, for the character of Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane; she was the mistress of Jules Brulatour of Eastman Kodak, and Brulatour put out the word that any studio which used her would get a discount on their film). This film was long thought lost until a nearly complete print from Belgium turned up in Britaiin in 2021 and has since been posted to YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg54vN--mLA, but in a terrible condition. In 1929 Warners remade it as Gold Diggers of Broadway, a full-out musical in two-strip Technicolor, but that version is also pretty much lost: a complete set of the Vitaphone soundtrack discs for the film survives (and was released a decade ago on Brad Kay’s Superbatone label) but only about 15 minutes of the picture does.

After the surprise success of 42nd Street in 1932, Warner Bros. greenlighted a remake if Gold Diggers on Broadway and called it Gold Diggers of 1933 – though the publicity for the film made it seem like a sequel instead of a remake º and my husband Charles and I watched the surviving bits of Gold Diggers of Broadway (we listened to the soundtrack discs and plugged in the two surviving bits of the film where they went) and then watched Gold Diggers of 1933. The most striking difference between the two was the Zeitgeist issue; Gold Diggers of Broadway was produced before the 1929 stock market crash (though it was released just as the economy was starting its long-term collapse) while Gold Diggers of 1933 was not only made during the depths of the Depressoin but worked the economic crisis rather deftly into its plot. I re-watched it last night and marveled at the fact that it’s now been longer between the time I first saw it (1971,when I was 17) and now than it was between the time it was made and the time I first saw it. The opening sequence – in which Barney Hopkins (Ned Sparks) is rehearsing a show number called “We’re In the Money” which boasts, “Old man Depression, you are through, you done us wrong.” featuring Fay Fortune (Ginger Rogers), who sings a chorus of the song in pig-Latin (something the real Rogers did as a joke during rehearsals, and directors Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley liked it and stuck it in the film), only a gang of law-enforcement officer led by the sheriff steps in and attaches the scenery and costumes – still packs a punch.

The film is full of “:pre-Code” sauciness, including one line between chorus girls Polly Parker (Ruby Keeler), Carol King (Joan Blondell) and Trixie Laverne (Aline MacMahon) about the strange young man named “Brad Roberts” (Dick Plwell), who lives either down the hall or across in the next building. Polly has heard Brad play his piano and fallen in love both with his music and with him,and Barney has auditioned Brad and offered him the job of writing the score for his next production – only Barney doesn’t have a backer for it. Brad offers to put up $15,000 for it and the girls wonder just how someone who’s apparently living under the strained circumstances that they are can possibly have that much money to invest in a show. Thinking he’s just teasing them, Trixie says,m “I’d like to have some of whatever he’s taking” – a direct reference to drug use that was one of the Production Code’s big no-nos. The plot of Gold Diggers of 1933, as adapted by the writing committee – screenplay by Erwin Gelsey and James Seymour,dialogue by Robert Boehm and Ben Markson – cuts back and forth between Depression realities and musical fantasies.Busby Berkeley gets four big production numbers – “We’re In the Money,” heard at the very start of the film (and interrupted by the irony that the show as canceled before it opens precisely because they’re not in the money); “Pettin’ in the Park,” heard midway through (and with some marvelously cheeky satire; midway through the number we see a business advertising roller skates for rent “for women who have to walk home,” and at the end the chorines are dressed in metal tops and Dicl Powell can’t figure out how to make love to Ruby Keeler until a baby, played by little-person actur Billy Barty, shows up and hands him a can opener); and “Shadow Waltz” and “REmember My Forgotten Man” at the end.

“Shadow Waltz” is one of Berkeley’smost audaciously abstract numbers – one reason for Berkeley’s comeback in the early 1970’s is that he was able to make essentially psychedelic images, only instead of light shows or abstract shapes he used actual human bodies – but “Remember My Forgotten Man” is the best part of the film. As a lament for the Depression it rivals “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and it’s delivered by Joan Blondell as essentially the 1933 versioin of rap. She talk-sings her way through the song – when she tries to let out her voice and sing at the end it’s oddly less effective – and I suspect Berkeley was thinking along the lines of Fanny Brice’s performance of “My Man” in the 1920 Ziegfeld Follies and how she re-invented herself as a tragedienne instead of a comedienne for this tough, mordant song. The astounding succession of images of people marching to war ahd then coming back to breadlines still packs a powerful punch and says all you need to know about the Depression and the blow it struck to the human spirit. The filmmakers seemed to know that this number was unfollowable because they made sure to wrap up the plot intrigues before the number takes place, so we cut from the big “Forgotten Man” number directly tot he end title.

TCM’s host tried to draw a distinction between the Wanrer Bros. musicals of the early 1930’s, which dealt frankly and openly with the Depression, and the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals which came after them and were frankly escapist – but the distinction isn’t as neatly drawn as all that. At least one Astaire-Rogers musical\, Swing Time, features him riding a freight train in utter destitution in a scene Arlene Croce described in The Gred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book as “top hats and empty pockets.” And there’s an interestingly ironic reference to Astaire: when Barney is encouraging Brad to play the lead in his musical based on Brad’s songs, he says he and Polly can become a star couple “like the Astaires.” He meant Fred Astaire and his sister Adele,whom he had never performed without until she retired in 1930 to marry into the British nobility – and he would achieve movie stardom in partnership with Ginger Rogers, who’s in this movie playing a dubiously talented woman who, after she loses the starring role in Barney’s previous show, tries to get a big role in Barney’s next production and also to win the comic-relief rich guy, Faneuil Peabody (Guy Kibbee) away from Aline MacMahon.

Stranger Next Door (Je'Caryous Entertainment, One Represent, Red Zeppelin Productions, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 5) I watched a dull, boring, thoroughly pointless Lifetime movie that was as wretched as the “premiere” the night before, Black Girl Missing, was exceptional. It was called Stranger Next Door and was also billed as a “premiere,” though the date listed on the imdb.com page for it was 2022, not 2023. (According to a trailer ini the film’s imb.com page, it was originally shown on July 10, 2022 on a channel called One Represent.) It was directed byVictoria Rowell and written by Camara Davis, and normally I give kudos to Lifetime for giving opportunities to women filmmakers – some of whom, like Christine Conradt, Vanessa Parise and Gina Gershon, have thoroughly deserved them – I would hope that the names of Ms. Rowell and Ms. Davis never darken the credits of a Lifetime movie (or anyone else’s) ever again. I’d been attracted to Stranger Next Door mainly because of the sheer drop-dead gorgeous hunkiness of the actor in the title role, Skyh Alvester Black. His imdb.com page says he’s been a dancer for such African-American divas as Beyoncé, Riuhanna and Mariah Carey, and he’s starring in a series of dramas produced by Tyler Perry that cast him as a Black male exotic dancer (i.e., stripper). He certainly has the body for it, and it would be nice to see him playing something other than a black-hearted villain, which of course is how Lifetime cast him. (Though there have been a few exceptions, for the most part genuinely sexy men in Lifetime movies turn out to be particularly nasty bad guys.)

Stranger Next Door adds to the growing number of Lifetime movies in which all hte principals, or most of them, are Black, not only the villain but also his principal victim, Rochelle Sellers (Vicky Jeudy). She plays an ex-cop in a community in Tennessee we’re not given the name of the city and only a wall sign lets us know the name of the state – who was investigating a drug gang when she found out her then-husband Michael was taking payoffs from the cartel leader. She ratted him out to the FBI and the result was that she got bounced off the force and forced into retirement, where she works from home as a computer security consultant. Her best friends are Terry Ensley (Angela Davis – no, not the same one), a Black fellow cop who’s worried because Rochelle’s pleadings for help running license plates and other ID’s might get her in trouble, or even fired, because the higher-ups on the force are still lo9yal to Michael; and Keele, pronounced “Keeley” (Tyra Tucker Haag), the silly white woman who lives on the other side from Rochelle of the house occupied by the titular stranger next door. Both Rochelle and Keele have the hots for Jesse and his tattooed chest and glorious pecs, but it’s Rochelle who finally beds him in a rather desultory soft-core porn scene that would have been considerably hotter in the hands of virtually any Lifetime director besides Victoria Rowell.

Then Rochelklke discovered inconsistencies in Jesse’s account of his background. Rochelle is also taking care of her aging father, Ernest Sellers (Tim Reid), a Viet Nam War veteran with whom Jesse bonds by sharing war stores because Jesse served – or at least says he served – in Iraq. Only Jesse’s military history doesn’t lineup with what he said it was. Rochelle is supposed to be a key witness in the upcoming corruption trial of her ex-husband, and for a while writer Davis leads us to believe that Jesse has been placed next door by Michael himself or his defenders on the police force to place Rochelle in a compromising situation that can be used to discredit her on the witnes stand. There’s a second witness against Michael, Tyler Price (Terry Latham), who can establish that Michael and the cartel leader knew each other despite Michael’s denials, but he gets away from his Black female police handler and gets shot on the streets, presumably to death, though his body is never discovered and Prescott, the young white male FBI agent who’s handling the case, still expects him to turn up and testify. When Rochelle’s computers go kablooey, thanks to malware Jesse planted on them during one of his visits to Rochelle’s bedroom, she immediately realizes he’s up to something evil and forbids her dad from seeing him again. She literally pulls her father out of Jesse’s house where the two of them were going through dad’s old Viet Nam memorabilia and bonding as fellow vets; Jesse has even taken dad to the Viet Nam Memorial, something Rochelle had never agreed to do.

With Rochelle having suddenly broken off with Jesse for reasons she can’t fathom, Keele makes her move on him – only instead of a hot sex session she gets tied up to a cot in his basement and tortured by Jesse, with a cool efficiency that suggests a particularly malevolent doctor ron amok. He has a wide variety of tools, including hammers with which to smash her kneecaps and ice picks and knives to cut her up. Jesse likes to listen to music while he tortures his victims – one of the few legitimately chilling images of the film is him putting on headphones just before he’s about to go to work on a victim – and it’s unclear what happens to her after that. Presumably he kills her, though as with Tyler one wonders how on earth he disposed of her body without leaving a trace. Through much of the movie Davis has kept us wondering whether Jesse is a free-lance sadist or an agent of Michael hired to shut up the witnesses against him, and n the end he turns out to be both: he’s a professional hit man but also one who loves to take time with his victims (especially his female ones) and make their last hours on earth miserable. I don’t know much about people who kill other people for a living, but my understanding is that they almost always work quickly and don’t torture their victims unless the people who hired them wanted some information out of them first. There’s also a plot twist in which an adult protective services worker shows up at Rochelle’s home investigating a complaint of elder abuse against her for the way she’s treated her dad – the complaint was filed by Michael as part of his revenge plot to have Rochelle declared an incompetent caregiver and have Ernest put in a nursing home. A more talented writer than Camara Davis might have made more of the Kafka-esque dilemma Rochelle finds herself in – she can’t go to the police because the police are on Michael’s side against her – but Davis can’t be bothered.

The film lumbers to a predictable conclusion in which Rochelle ends up in Jesse’s dungeon about to be tortured to death the same way Keele was – only she manages to get free of her bonds (for someone as into bondage as Jesse, he’s not very good at it) and dad attacks Jesse with an old pistol he kept from his service days in Viet Nam. Just as Jesse mocks him for using such an old and presumably unreliable gun, it jams, but the distraction has given Rochelle time to grab Jesse’s gun and shoot him with it. The central premise of Stranger Next Door could actually have made a pretty good Lifetime movie, but Camara Davis is one of those scenarists who, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, believes in writing at least six impossible things before breakfast, and Victoria Rowell’s slovenly, ah-the-hell-with-it direction matches the quality (or lack thereof) of Davis’s writing all too well. It also doesn’t help that Vicky Jeudy as Rochelle has her hair cut so severely short she looks like a man in most of her close-ups; through much of the fimn I kept wondering, “Who’s that guy? Oh, it’s Rochelle!” The film’s costume designer, Ann Thomas, hasn’t helped her any by giving her tops and vests that mash down her breasts. Cmon. haven’t you people ever seen Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, where for the last quarter-century (almost) Mariska Hargitay has proven you can be both a tough cop and a hot, sexy, voluptuous woman at the same time?

Black Girl Missing (Johnson Production Group, Motion Content Group, Lifetime,2023), and Beyond the Headlines: Black Girl Missing (AMS Pictures, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 4) I watched a much-ballyhooed Lifetime movie called Black Girl Missing that more than lived up to the hype. It was a personal project for its star, Garcelle Beauvais, who plays Cheryl Baker, widowed mother of two teenage girls, Lauren (Iyana Halley) and Marle pronounced “Marley” (Tay8lor Mosby). Beauvais also executive-produced the film and narrated a documentary called Behind the Headlines: Black Girl Missing that was shown right after it. The promos for the film made clear that one of its messages would be an anti-racist statement that in the world of tabloid journalism and social media, Black lives don’t matter, at least nowhere nearly as much as white lives. I give credit to director Delmar Washington and writer Kyle Futterman for expertly threading the fine line between making the anti-racist point without overdoing it and getting preachy. One way they pull this off was by having the disappearance of the central character’s older daughter Lauren, who goes missing after a troubled weekend at home from college, coupled with that of a white girl from Oregon, Jessica Russo. Cheryl contacts the local TV news station and finds out that their corporate owners have decided to make Jessica Russo’s story the object of a nationwide search while Lauren’s story, even though it’s local, is simply deemed not important enough to deserve any of their precious airtime. Cheryl works with a reporter for the station named Elise (Linda Park), whom she appeals to as both a fellow mother and a fellow person of color (though Asian instead of Black), and Elise does her best but her hands are tied and her own job is vaguely threatened if she keeps pushing Lauren’s story. Cheryl also reports Lauren’s disappearance to the police, who assign the case to a Detective Dean, but most of Cheryl’s calls to him go to voicemail and even when they talk, he’s dismissive of her and says that as an 18-year-old Lauren is under no legal obligation to maintain contact with her one surviving parent.

Lauren’s younger sister Marle joins the hunt for the missing Lauren and ultimately gets in touch with a group of amateur computer hackers who get together online and work to solve unsolved crimes. Thanks to the efforts of a 16-year-old white girl on this network who is a whiz at hacking, Cheryl and Marle are finally able to unlock Lauren’s laptop – at least the one she left behind rather than the new one her abductor gave her when he was still posing as a man roughly her own age who was romantically interested in her – and they discover Lauren was being bullied at school by her dorm roommate, Annie Dolan (Taylor Ann Thompson). They have two suspects, Annie and Eddie Brick (Zack Gold), the supervisor at the coffeehouse where Lauren worked and sort of a Harvey Weinstein in training, always hitting on the young women who work there and threatening their jobs if they don’t go along with him. But both of them have solid alibis for the night Lauren was taken. Through the computer and information in the receipt for the items Lauren received from her online “admirer” through Amazon.com, Cheryl and Marle are finally able to trace her abductor to a local record store where a young man works. Cheryl learns that the photo on the dating app where Lauren met her captor is really named Charlie,m but his photo was “catfished” by Lauren’s abductor and identified as “Ian Turner” – or “Robert Gregory,” the name he’s using when Marle decides to go on line herself and pose as a young woman interested in this man, a stratagem which understandably horrifies her mom. “I’ve already lost one daughter to this creep! I don’t want to risk losing another one!” Mom says. Ultimately, after Lauren has been missing for 40 days, Cheryl finally tracks her down and discovers her still alive on the outskirts of the town where all this took place, Blue Valley, Texas. Laurenm is being held captive in a ramshackle old house on the property, and we get just a brief glimpse of her captor – a tall, heavy-set, balding man with a full beard, who kooks nothing like Charlie’s online photo – before they wrestle, he gets hold of her and it looks like he’s about to kill her when the police, alerted by Marle, finally show up and arrest him.

Black Girl Missing is an excellent drama, continuing the run of three quite good fact-based movies Lifetime has been showing over the last few weeks as their Saturday night “premieres.” It’s got everything we could want from a LIfetime movie: a coherent plot, excellent acting (particularly by Garcelle Beauvais, for whom, as I mentioned earlier, this was a personal project and not just another paycheck), quality suspense direction by Delmar Washington and an overall visceral feeling of excitement mixed with loathing for whoever the creep is who put Lauren into this. There’s even a nice ironic twist in Kale Futterman’s script: after Elinse finally wins the battle with her superiors at the local TV station to do a feature on Lauren’s disappearance, it’s pulled from the air because Jessica Russo, the white girl in Oregon who the station and its corporate masters thought was more newsworthy than the Black girl in their own backyard,has just been found. Only it turns out that Jessica Russo really did just run away from home, while one of the police excuses for not doing more to find Lauren’was the idea that she jad just run away.

My only qualm about Black Girl Missing is that either of the two real-life disappearances of teenage Black girls profiled in the Behind the Headlines documentary shown just after it might have made a better basis for a movie. One was the abduction of Kyla Flagg from her home in Snellville, Georgia, a suburb just north of Atlanta, in May 2021 and was fortunately found alive a month and a half later. The other was Joniah Walker, who disappeared from her home in Milwaukee in June 2022 and whose whereabouts remain unknown. Both Kyla and Joniah were children of divorced parents who shared custody, and I suspect one reason writer Futterman made Cheryl Baker in Black Girl Missing a widow instead of a divorcée was to avoid reinforcing the racist stereotype that Black people can’t keep relationships together. Kyla was lured from her home by a Texas pedophile named Robert David Fyke, who communicated with her through social media for over a month before he literally came to Georgia to pick her up. His car was photographed by her father’s “ring camera,” a surveillance tool mounted as part of his doorbell, and authorities checking out Fyke noticed the same car parked outside his home in Texas. But the story gets worse; once he got tired of her he unloaded her onto another sicko, this time in Connecticut, and that’;s where her parents finally found her alive. Aside from begging the question of just how she got to Connecticut – my guess would be that her “purchaser” drove out to Texas to pick her up – this is uncomfortably reminiscent of the whole reason African-Americans exist in the first place: their ancestors were captured and taken here to be slaves, and among the privileges of slaveowners was the right to force themselves sexually on any of their slaves because the slaves had o legal right to resist.

Black Girl Missing was produced by Lifetime and their producers, Johnson Production Group and Motion Content Group, as part of a month-long commitment to program shows featuring violence against women in an effort to bring public awareness. There’s even a Web site for an organization called Black and Missing, Inc.,https://www.blackandmissinginc.com/, and while no one from Black and Missing appears in the fiction film an actress, Jeanette Branch, plays the fictional “Loretta Nix” from that organization. Also, Tanesha Howard, real-life mother of Joniah Walker, is listed as one of the characters in the film and is played by actress Elisha Davis. Black Girl Missing is a first-rate production and one fully worthy of your attention.

Death from a Distance (Invincible, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I finally ended up running for my husband Charles and I last night (March 3) was Death from a Distance, a 1935 production from Invincible Pictures, a short-lived indie outfit whose output was considerably better technically than most indie cheapies because they had a distribution deal with Universal. As a result they were allowed to shoot on the Universal lot and have access to state-of-the-art equipment as well as standing sets. Invincible and its sister company Chesterfield had different studio heads (George Batcheller ran Chesterfield and Maury Cohen ran Invincible), but they relied on many of the same behind-the-camera personnel, including director Frank L. Strayer and cinematographer M. A. Andersen, both of whom are credited here. Strayer had one of the most frustrating careers for movie buffs because, after doing surprisingly compelling work in various genres in the early 1930’s for independent studios – including two of the finest indie horror films of the period, The Vampire Bat (1933) and Condemned to Live (1935) – upon the demise of Chesterfield and Invincible in 1935 Strayer signed with Columbia and accepted steady work as director of the Blondie series of films based on Chic Young’s domestic sitcom comic strip. Alas, whatever hopes I may have had for this film based on Strayer’s reputation and the handful of truly great films he made – including Fugitive Road, a World War I drama starring Erich von Stroheim (and it’s clear from the film that Stroheim taught Strayer a few things about how to direct) – were pretty quickly dashed.

The most interesting aspect of Death from a Distance was its setting, the Griffith Park observatory and in particular its planetarium (which we’re told was one of only three extant in the U.S. – was that true?) and a giant reflecting telescope that features prominently in the climax. Otherwise, Death from a Distance is a whodunit that offers one object lesson after another in how not to do that particular genre. The story begins at a nighttime lecture at the planetarium that features Professor Ernst Einfeld (Lee Kohlmar), affecting one of the worst attempts at a Swedish accent on film (though the worst ever in my experience was George F. Marion’s as Greta Garbo’s father in Anna Christie, where it sounded even worse because he was up against Garbo’s real one, and ironically Marion is in this film, too). Admission is by invitation only, so when one of the audience members, Dr. Stone, is shot and killed during the lecture, the organizers close and lock the doors until the police arrive. Leading the investigation is police detective lieutenant Ted Mallory (Russell Hopton), and his love-hate relationship with Post-Telegraph reporter Kay Palmer (Lola Lane, three years before she got to play the same sort of role at a major studio, Warner Bros., in Torchy Blane in Panama) is by far the best and most entertaining aspect of the film. When he’s not locking her out of the lecture hall and planetarium where the killing took place, he’s asking her to go to dinner with him. Needless to say, she had an irascible editor who demands scoop after scoop from her and a steady stream of stories even when she has nothing to report.

Other than that, Death from a Distance is one of those movies that seems to last a lot longer than its 68-minute running time, with way too many suspects, all too little information about them, and a final revelation that seems to have come from the star Arcturus, which the lecture Professor Einfeld was delivering is about. For much of the film I thought Dr. Stone was an astronomer, or at least a Ph.D., but it turns out he was actually a medical doctor. After feeding us a couple of red herrings – Ahmat Haidru (John Davidson), an undocumented immigrant from India (He’s referred to as a “Hindu” even though his first name suggests he’s a Muslim); and Langsdale (Wheeler Oakman), who just got out of prison two years earlier for assult with intent to kill and had changed his name from Fremont to avoid being tainted by his ex-con past – writer John W. Krafft (who lost one of the “f”’s from his name in his credit) finally reveals that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Jim Gray (George F. Marion). His motive is as obscure as the rest of it: it seems that Dr. Stone was a surgeon whose bungled operation on Jim’s son left the son dead and Jim bereft, grieving and seeking revenge. Ho hum. At least Krafft gave him an interesting final exit: just as he's holding a gun on the rest of the cast trying to take them all hostage, he's shot and killed by the gun he'd inserted in the telescope and set to go off at exactly 9:30 because that's when Professor Einfeld was using it to look at Arcturus.

Death from a Distance is a ponderous bore, and in order to make a good movie out of it we’d have had to learn more about the various suspects and their potential motives. We’d have also had to learn more about Dr. Stone than we do; in the film as it stands he’s just an anoymous attendee at a lecture until he gets himself killed, and like so much else in this maddening movie his motive seems to come out of left field – or maybe I should say outer space. Charles said he thought a musical score could have helped, but I’m inclined to disagree; given the quality (or lack thereof) of the sorts of music available to filmmakers on a Chesterfield-Invincible budget, I’m inclined to think a background score would have just made the film seem cheesier. The film’s imdb.com page lists Sudney Cutler as the film’s composer, though all the music occurs in the opening and closing credits, and there’s the dreaded listing of Abe Meyer and his notorious Meyer Synchronizing Service, which marketed stock music to various indie producers who couldn’t afford to record music on their own. Some filmmakers – notably Ray Taylor in the Bela Lugosi serial The Return of Chandu (1934) – managed to find real musico-cinematic nuggets in Meyer’s rent-a-scores, but for the most part Meyer’s music boxes just made the films even more clichéd and insufferable.

He Walked by Night (Bryan Foy Productions, Eagle-Lion, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 2) I once again cracked open the 50-film= “Crime Wave” DVD box and brought forth a quite interesting movie for my husband Cahrles and I to watch together: He Walked by Night, a 1948 low-budget film noir from Eagle-Lion Pictures (the former Producers’ REleasing Corporation, or PRC, purchased by J. Arthur Rank because he wanted his own U.S. outlet for his british films – he even picked a name for the merged company that would associate the national animals of the U.S. and U.K.!).Among other things, He Walked by Night gave birth to the radio and then TV series Dragnet; the film’s technical advisor,real-life Los Angeles police sergeant Marty Wynn,who suggested to actor Jack Webb (who had a minor part in the film and,surprisingly, did not play a cop) that he launch a radio series in which he would play a police sergeant investigating crimes drawn from real life. Though the narration in He Walked by Night is delivered in third person instead of by the lead police official investigating the crime, a lot of the other key elements of Dragnet are already here, including the stentorian narrator, the specificity with which the locales are named as the real locations, and even the line at the end of the fi;m’s written foreword, ”Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Even the word “dragnet” features prominently in the film's dialogue, relating to a police sweep of the area in which a mysterious criminal has just shot a police officer, Rawlins (John McGuire). The cops round up just about everybody in the neighborhood where the shooting took place in a scene that ias more than a bit of “Round up the usual suspects” about it, and they’re taken to the police station and basically forced to prove their innocence.

He Walked by Night is an odd mix of police procedural and film noir, dealing with a master criminal named Roy Martin, a.k.a. Roy Morgan (Richard Basehart), loosely based on real-life criminal Erwin ‘Machine Gun” Walker and a series of crimes he committed in 1946. Like the real-life Walker, Roy Martin had once worked for the police department – though while Walker was a clerk in the fingerprints department of the fingerprint division, Martin in the movie worked as a radio technician until he was drafted during World War II. He had a private job with the Reves Sound Service (which really existed, though not the way it’s depicted in this film). Roy declined his old job when boss Paul Reeves (Whit Bissell), offered it back to him after the war. though Roy periodically showed up at Reeves’ office with elaborate pieces of radio and TV equipment. Supposedly these were items he invented and offered to Reeves either to sell them or rent them out, but in fact the one piece of equipment we see, a TV projector (back when projection TV’s were still a novelty; in fact, TV’s themselves were still a novelty in 1948), turns out to have been stolen from a man named Dunning (Thomas Browne Henry), who shows up at Reeves offering to buy it and then realizes it’s actually his. Rawlins is shot but doesn’t die right away – he lingers in a coma for a day or so and there’s a marvelous bit of acting by Louise Kane as his widow, silently reacting to the hews that he’s died – and later another officer s shot by Martin and so severely wounded that he’s going to be paralyzed for the rest of his life.

Though it certainly visually qualifies as film noir, especially given John Alton’s extraordinary cinematography (Alton got a title card to himself in the opening credits, a rare honor for a cinematographer then, and in the film’s recent reissue the trailer was reworked to make Alton’s presence a selling point),thematically it doesn’t. The good cops are all good, the bad villain is all bad, and there aren’t the usual sexual motives behind him. In fact, Roy Martin is what would nowadays be called an ‘incel” (short for “involuntarily celibate”), though writers John C. Higgins and Crane Wilbur don’t suggest that his sheer lack of any sexual or romantic attachments make him a criminal. In fact, one of the weakest elements of this film is that we neverget an explanation of What Made Roy Run – that bothered Charles even more than it did me – despite the hint dropped by the narrator (Reed Hadley) early on that certainly a man who commits such elaborately planned crimes must have some sort of overarching motive. The best parts of the film are the opening and the closing, both extended sequences with little or no dialogue and Alton’s images taking the noir look to the max. The climax takes place in the Los Angeles storm drains, a series of underground tunnels and pipes deigned to carry rainwater to toe sea, which Martin has used effectively to evade capture through most of the film. Once the cops finally figure out that that’s how he’s getting away from them so quickly and easily, they corner him in the drains and ultimately gun him down and kill him – unlike the real Walker, who was taken alive, convicted, sentenced to death but declared legally isane just before he was to be executed. Instead he was held in a mental institution for 12 years before he was declared sane, his sentence was commuted to life without parole, and twice he appealed to the California Supreme Court. On its second hearing the state supreme court threw out the “without parole” part of his sentence, and he was duly paroled in 1974. Walker changed his name and lived an apparently above-board life as a chemist until his death in 2008.

He Walked by Night had both writer and director trouble; Harry Essex was called in for some uncreedited tweaking of the script The director of record was Alfred Werker, a better-than-average 20th Century-Fox house director who made his best film, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), there. It was the second of the 14 films featuring Basil Rathbone asSherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, and to my mind quite the best of them. Werker also did A-Haunting We Will Go, an attempt at horror-comedy with Laurel and Hardy, the second of their generally sorry set of six Fox films. All the source3s I have on this film, including its imdb.com page and the book The Film Noir Encyclopedia, state that Anthony Mann took over as director on part of the film, but my sources are frustratingly unclear as to just what Mann directed in the film, why he was called in or how much work he did. Both Werker and Mann were talented directors but without much of a personal stamp – it’s not like Nicholas Ray taking over for Josef von Sternberg on the 1952 film noir Macao, in which the junctures were quite obvious, especially in their attitudes towards Jane Russell’s character (Sternberg tried to make her remote and Dietrichesque, while in Ray’s footage she’s basically one of the boys – and it’s not clear why a second director was needed, though Mann would make his reputation a year later with T-Men, another part-procedural and part-noir but a better movie than He Walked by Night.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Hal Wallis Productions, Paramount, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second movie my husband Charles and I watched on Tuesday, February 28 was another entry from the 50-film “Crime Wave” boxed set of public-domain DVD’s, but it was considerably better than House of Mystery (let’s face it: literally watching paint dry would be better entertainment than House of Mystery): The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Charles was curious about how The Strange Love of Martha Ivers slipped into the public domain since it was a production by a major studio (Paramount), with a major producer (Hal B. Wallis, who became an independent producer at Paramount after he walked out of Warner Bros. following the kerfuffle over the Academy Award for Casablanca, which Jack Warner literally grabbed out of Wallis’s hand at the awards ceremony as if it were the baton in a relay race) witha major director (Lewis Milestone), a major writer (Robert Rossen) and a major cast: Barbara Stanwych, Van Heflin, Lizabeth Scott (well, she was never a major star but Hal Wallis clearly thought she was and cast her accordingly), and a young Kirk Douglas making his film debut. It starts out in the Midwestern company town of Iverstown, run by the imperious aunt Ivers (Judith Anderson) – if she has a first name, we never learn it – whose niece Martha tries to run away from her aunt but always gets caught. In the prologue Martha is played by Janis Wilson, and we’re told that Martha is the product of a brief marriage between her mom, a blood Ivers, and her dad, a mill-hand at the Ivers factory named Smith. During one of their arguments Martha insists that her last name is Smith, and her anut says, “No, your last name is Ivers I had it legally changed.” She also tells Martha, “The only good thing your father did for you was die.”

On the proverbial dark and stormy night (so many scenes ubThe Strange Love of Martha Ivers take place during thunderstorms it practically qualifies as Gothic horror as well as film noir), she plots to run away with Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman), who plans to join the circus, only she’s ratted out by young Walter O’Neil (Mickey Kuhn) and brought back home to her aunt. Walter’s dad (Roman Bohnen) shows up expecting that Aunt Ivers will reward him by paying for his son to go to Harvard, where he plans to study law, the aunt says that she doesn’t care whether he gets to go to Harvard or not. Martha has secretly been keeping a cat, which Aunt Ivers discovers and starts whipping with a riding crop. When Martha sees her doing that she grabs the crop from her hand and starts beating her with it. The ferocity of her blows is so intense that Aunt Ivers takes a header and falls down the house’s big staircase to her death. Rather than call the police, Martha and Walter claim that the aunt’s death was an accident. The estate hires O’Neil to raise Martha until she comes of age. Sam was on the scene but didn’t actually see Martha kill Aunt Ivers. Flash-forward 18 years and Martha, Sam and Walter have grown up to be Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin and Kirk Douglas, respectively. Sam became a professional gambler and bookmaker,and h e happens to be driving through Iverstown when he gets distracted and plows his car into a lamppost. That leaves him stuck in Iverstown for however long it takes for his car to be repaired. Martha Overs is now the ruler of Iverstown – there’s technically a city government but her will is law – and Walter O’Neil is her husband, a practicing attorney running for re-election as D.A. as the first step towards a political career that Martha is determined will vault him to the state governorship and, eventually, the presidency. Only Walter couldn’t be less interested in politics or power; he’s an alcoholic and misses a big radio speech for his campaign that Martha had arranged for him and goes on to deliver in his place.

He got to be a D.A. in the first place by leading the prosecution of a man whom Martha decided to frame for her aunt’s murder – she even perjured herself by identifying him as her aunt’s killer – and he feels guilty about it but Martha, sounding like an Ayn Rand character, says that even if he didn’t kill her aunt he’s no doubt guilty of something and sacrificing his life for theirs was morally O.K. Meanwhile, Sam has encountered a young woman named Antonia “Toni” Marachek (Lizabeth Scott) who was just paroled from jail – presumably for prostitution, though that’s only hinted at in the coy way forced on filmmakers by the Production Code – only a condition of her release was that she return to her home town and the abusive father he ran away from in the first place. The fear of both Martha and Walter is that Sam, who was there the night Martha killed her aunt, is going to rat them out and spoil all their plans. Walter has Toni arrested for violating her parole by returning the bus ticket she’d been provided to go home, and the two start a relationship based on staying in adjoining rooms in the Drake Hotel. Walter blackmails Toni into framing Sam by having a thug pose as Toni’s husband (she’s unmarried for real) and lure him outside a bar, where h e’s put in a car, driven to the outskirts of town and roughed up. Martha sounds more and more like an Ayn Rand heroine as she boasts that when she took over Iverstown the factory was on one lot and employed 3,000 people; now it’s expanded over several acres and employs 30,000. (This harkens back to one of her early roles at Warner Bros., Edna Ferber’s So Big, in which she played a poor woman forced into a loveless marriage with an older farmer; upon his death she builds his farm into a huge agricultural factory by planting asparagus, which her late husband had refused to do.) At one point Martha imperiously barges into Sam’s room, where she catches him with Toni, and when he questions her presence,s he says, “I have special privileges in this hotel. I own it.”

The only thing that can derail her and Walter’s plans for the future is if Sam rats them out about her aunt’s murder, though in factr he didn’t see it happen and only came on the scene later. Not knowing this, Martha blurts out the big secret. She also starts a seduction attempt on Sam, and Walter tells him in the laconic way the Production Code forced on the filmmakers that Sam shouldn’t think he’s the first guy Martha has tricked with. There’s been a long series of them, all plucked from the Ivers factory’s workforce and ultimately rewarded with more prestigious jobs in the Ivers enterprises. In the end Sam and Toni flee town once his car is repaired, while Martha and Walter confront each other and Milestone cuts away so we don’t see what happens, but we hear twu gunshots and realize that Martha and Walter have shot either themselves or each other. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers began as a story by writer John Patrick (billed as “Jack Patrick” in the credits) called Bleeding Heart, and when I mentioned that to Charles the first time we watched this film together, he said, “You mean someone thought The Strange Love of Martha Ivers was actually better?” According to director Milestone, the only part of Bleeding Heart he actually used was the prologue and the whole idea of a prominent person whose position is jeopardized by an old acquaintance returning to town with a dangerous secret. Milestone discussed the film extensively in his interview with Charles Higham and Joen Greenberg for their1969 book The Celluloid Muse, and he said he read Bleeding Heart int hecompany of Robert Rossen and discussed it with him, then agreed to make themovie for Hal Wallis if Rossen were hired to write it.

He also described the cast members: “barbara Stanwyck was a great trouper and was wonderful to work with; so was Judith Anderson, who played the aunt. This was Kirk Douglas’s first picture, and he was obviously new, very anxious to learn and very modest.” Those qualities show through in his performance and help make him believable as the unscrupulous but also weak character he’s playing. I’ve often lamented that, like Burt Lancaster, Douglas rose to stardom so quickly that eventually he could or would only play heroes, even though many of his best early films – including Out of the Past (1947), in which he played a vicious gangster; or Detective Story (1951), in which he was a corrupt cop – cast him as villains. Milestone also disliked working for Hal Wallis; in his interview for The Celluloid Muse he called Wallis “a nuisance” and said that Wallis re-edited the film after Milestone had left the lot. “The problem was not that he wanted to take things out – he wanted to add things,” Milestone said. “After I left, for example, he had someone shoot big, enormous close-ups of Lizabeth Scott, which he proceeded to insert in the picture.” (It’s not hard to see where the inserts came; they occurred during the big dramatic scenes between her and Van Heflin. and though they’re’ not especially distracting they give the scenes between the two an odd start-and-stop quality.) This time around I liked The Strange Love of Martha Ivers quite a bit better than I have before, and I think it was mainly because of the subtle but unmistakable anti-capitalist message which I suspect Robert Rossen inserted into the script (with, according to imdb.com, uncredited help from Frank Capra’s old writing partner, Robert Riskin). If there ever was a movie that illustrated the old saying that behind every great fortune there is a great crime, The Strange Loive of Martha Ivers is it.

House of Mystery (Van Beuren Studios, RKO, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 28) at 8 I ran my husband Charles two more movies from the 50-film “Crime Wave” DVD boxed set, House of Mystery and The Strange Lvoe of Martha Ivers. I was briefly perplexed because imdb.com lists quite a few films with the title House of Mystery, including at least three that seemed likely to be the one in the box: from 1931, 1934 and 1940,respectively. This House of Mystery was the 1934 version, produced by Paul Malvern and directed by William Nigh – and Nigh’s presence as director is almost always a bad sign. With only a handful of exceptions, a Willliam Nigh film can be counted on to be boring, soporific, slovenly acted and just plain dull. This one was no exception – after it was over Charles called it “chloroform on celluloid” – though, as with a lot of Nigh’s films, the basic story had real potential and could have been entertaining with a more competent director. The 1934 House of Mystery was based on a play by Adam Hull Shirk called The Ape, and apes figure prominently in Shirk’s oeuvre. His most famous (or infamous) credit on film was a 1930 pseudo-documentary called Ingagi, in which a group of white explorers visit the Congo to hunt down a gorilla-worshipping tribe and find them literally sacrificing a young woman to their gorilla-god. The gimmick is that the gorilla supposedly had sex with the woman and produced a mixed-species monster as their offspring. The producers of Ingagi tried to pass it off as an actual documentary, but they were “outed” when someone recognized one of the Black people in the cast as a fairly well-known African-American actor whose face was shown in casting directories.

The 1934 House of Mystery opens with a prologue set, according to the opening title, in “Asia – 1913.” The title doesn’t specify just where in Asia it takes place, but judging from the reference to “caste” in the dialogue and the six-armed statue of a god in the temple sequence it’s not hard to figure out that it’s in India. The central character of the prologue is John Prendergast (Clay Clement), who’s ostensibly an anthropologist leading an expedition to research India’s ancient history. Only he’s really just there to loot the sacred Hindu temples for their gold and other riches, and he’s also an alcoholic and in love –oir at least in l;ust – with Hindu priestess Chanda (Joyzelle Joyner from the cast of the 19030 science-fiction musical Just Imagine, though she’s billed here as “Laya Joy”). Prendergast disrupts the big church service at the temple, desecrates the altar, steals the six-armed god statue (it’s of the god Kali, though the name is pronounced ”KAY-lie” instead of the usual “Kah-LEE”) and runs off with boththe gold and the priestess. Needless to say, the Hindu priest officiating at the ceremony calls down a curse on Prendergast and anyone else who receives any money from his crimes, and when we cut to the 1934 present Prendergast – or “Pren,” as he now calls himself – is in a wheelchair after having suffered a sudden, unexplained paralysis in both legs. He and his attorney invite the original investors in his expedition, or their heirs if they’ve died in the meantime, to spend a week at his old dark house, at the end of which he will distribute the remaining money he made from the trip. Only he’s already given shares to two Englishmen who were suddenly murdered after they got the money.

Alas, the U.S. house guests of Pren also start getting murdered, one by one, and each of the killings is preceded by the sound of a tom-tom drum and the scent of incense. There’s al;so a stuffed ape in Pren’s study and it’s so lifelike that it fools several people in the movie, including the police officers who arrive to investigate the murders and are even dumber than their usual counterparts in 1930’s films. The stuffed ape is actually mounted in front of a secret doorway behind which is a real ape who has been trained to kill the first human being it sees whenever it hears the tom-tom and smells the incense. It’s no particular surprise when we learn that Pren has merely faked being disabled – virtually nobody shown n a wheelchair in a 1930’s movie actually needed it (that changed only when Lionel Barrymore’s arthritis got so bad ne needed a wheelchair for real, so MGM had to find him parts he could play from one) – but there’s a legitimate surprise when it’s revealed that the real culprit behind the killings is [spoiler alert!] Chanda the Hindu priestess, who ranm off with Pren not because she was in love with him but because she wanted to follow him to make sure the curse worked.

House of Mystery got a nominal remake in 1940 as The Ape from Monogram Studios, again directed by William Nigh (unfortunately), though with the plot totally reworked. In that film Boris Karloff played a scientist who goes around killing people to extract their spinal fluid so he can make a serum that will cure his paralyzed daughter. The Ape was one of Karloff’s mad-scientist movies like the ones he was making at Columbia at the time. and he supposedly committed the murders in an ape suit he made himself from a real ape whom he’d stolen from a local circus – and the film’s writers, Curt Siodmak (who was usually much better than this) and Ricahrd Carroll, totally ignored the major amount of skinning and tanning needed to turn an ape carcass into a viable ape-suit for a human. The screenwriter of House of Mystery was Albert DeMond, mostly a scribe of Republic Westerns and serials, though he was the author of one of the most hilariously over-the-top movies of all time, The Red Menace (1949), which Charles and I watched together years ago and when it was over I said, “As Right-wing cinema goes, this is not The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will.”