Man's Castle (Columbia, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After You Can’t Take It With You, with all the late-night talk shows still in reruns after the holidays, I kept on Turner Classic Movies for a film that’s long been a quirky favorite of mine: Man’s Castle, made at Columbia in 1933 and directed by Frank Borzage. At the time Borzage was a prestige director known for romantic melodramas; he’d become a star director with the 1927 mega-hit Seventh Heaven, made at Fox and starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell (it won Gaynor the first-ever Academy Award for Best Actress). He was one of the first directors to free-lance instead of being tied to one studio, and among his other films during this period was A Farewell to Arms (1932), the first film based on a story by Ernest Hemingway, in which Borzage and writers Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H. P. Garrett managed the interesting feat of turning a Hemingway novel into a “women’s picture.” A Farewell to Arms was made for Paramount and starred Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. Always on the lookout for major directors he could induce into working at Columbia – he’d scored Howard Hawks to make the marvelous prison picture The Criminal Code in 1931 with Walter Huston, Constance Cummings, Boris Karloff and Phillips Holmes – Columbia Pictures production chief Harry Cohn snagged Borzage to make Man’s Castle, a surprisingly downbeat romance among Depression-era people. Written by Jo Swerling based on a play by Lawrence Hazard, Man’s Castle tells the story of Bill (Spencer Tracy) and Trina (Loretta Young), who meet-cute one night when they go skinny-dipping in New York’s Central Park Lake. Bill is wearing a tuxedo, a top hat and a cummerbund, and naturally both Trina and we assume he’s rich – especially when he takes her to a swanky restaurant and orders her a fancy meal, since she hasn’t eaten in two days. Then he announces to the proprietor that he doesn’t have any money to pay the bill, either, and he causes such a ruckus that the owner throws him out rather than let him stay there and keep ranting how unjust it is that there are 12 million unemployed people in the U.S. He also dares the owner to have him arrested, pointing out that if he’s sent to jail he’ll serve a 30-day sentence and the government will feed him at taxpayers’ (including the restaurateur’s) expense.

When Bill finds out that Trina is homeless, he offers her a chance to move in with him at a squatter’s camp on the edge of the lake, where his neighbors include retired minister Ira (Walter Connolly, who usually played irascible editors chewing out star reporters played by people like Clark Gable or Fredric March) and his roommate Flossie (a marvelous character performance by Marjorie Rambeau). They become lovers, only there’s a villain in the piece, Bragg (Arthur Hohl), who’s after Trina himself. At one point Bragg tells Bill that there’s a burlesque star named Fay La Rue (Glenda Farrell) and he’s been hired to serve a summons on her, only she’s surrounded by three bodyguards who won’t let anyone get close enough to her to serve her. Offering to take on the job for $5 – half the fee Bragg was promised – Bill gets in the theatre where Fay is performing a song called “Surprise,” and he makes his way through the house and crashes the stage, serving her with the word “Surprise.” Fay is taken with Bill enough that she invites him to her place, obviously to make him her sexual boy-toy (she complains that she’s tired of the man she had to sleep with to get her burlesque job in the first place), and asks him to accompany her to London for her next job. But he begs off out of loyalty to Trina. Trina is proud of her new stove – which Bill bought her on the installment plan, using he $5 he got from serving Fay as the down payment – but Bill is a “bindlestiff,” a wanderer who doesn’t like to stay in one place very long. He misses the freedom of the open road, and every time he hears a train go by he wants to leave Trina and the camp and head out on it. Then Trina tells him she’s pregnant, and Ira marries them. But Bill still wants to leave, and in desperation and because he wants to make sure Trina and their child (whom Bill is convinced will be a boy even though in 1933 there was no way to tell in advance) are well provided for when he hits the open road, he reluctantly agrees to join Bragg in a robbery of the toy company where Bragg used to work until he got laid off. Complicating things is that Ira is the night watchman at the toy factory, though he’s given to sleeping on the job. The night of the robbery Bill becomes obsessed with a toy soldier that plays “Yankee Doodle,” and he keeps playing with this item until he wakes up Ira, who breaks up the robbery. Bragg then decides to turn on the burglar alarm himself, confident that he can escape in time and the cops will arrest Bill, which will eliminate the competition for Trina. Only when Bragg gets back to the squatters’ camp, Flossie (ya remember Flossie?) shoots him with Ira’s gun – which Bill took away from him during the robbery but Flossie induced him to give it back – and ultimately Bill decides to leave town but to take Flossie with him.

Man’s Castle is a quite chilling film – not surprisingly, it was a box-office flop (audiences living through the Depression weren’t interested in seeing a movie that reflected their own conditions; instead they wanted escapist fantasies or crime and horror films) – that holds up stunningly, though for years the only prints available were from a 1938 reissue. Columbia re-released the film to take advantage of Spencer Tracy’s new-found popularity after he moved from Fox to MGM in 1935, but they had to cut the shit out of it to meet the new, tougher enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code that had started in 1934 with the formation of the Legion of Decency, a pressure group from the Roman Catholic Church that determined to force off the screen any content they didn’t consider morally acceptable. Accordingly Columbia had to cut Man’s Castle down from its original 75 minutes to 66, and according to the Wikipedia page on the film, “This resulted in a number of blatantly obvious jump cuts where racy dialogue has been removed, as well as the deletion of a shot of a nude Young (or more likely a stunt double) diving into the river.” (Ironically, Loretta Young was a hard-core Catholic in real life, and this adds a special piquance to the lines in which she rejects Bill’s and others’ oblique suggestions that she become a prostitute to earn a living.) Fortunately, Turner Classic Movies showed a print of the full 75-minute version, with the deleted scenes restored and the delightfully cheesy original Columbia logo, an animated scene of the Statue of Liberty with the words “A Columbia Production” in an arc across the top of it. (The 1938 reissue featured the then-current Columbia logo with a more credible representation of the Statue of Liberty and the word “COLUMBIA” in intimidating all-caps emblazoned in a straight line above it.) Man’s Castle holds up quite well as a romantic melodrama about people in poverty eking out a living as best they can, though critics of the time compared it invidiously to Seventh Heaven; New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall wrote, “[T]he story is by no means as plausible or as poetic as that memorable old work.” But the quiet dignity of Spencer Tracy’s and Loretta Young’s performances, as well as the marvelous supporting work of Marjorie Rambeau, Glenda Farrell and child actor Dickie Moore (a baseball-obsessed kid on whom Bill palms off a baseball supposedly autographed by Babe Ruth) and the typically atmospheric photography of Joseph August, who’s expert at creating the haunting images of doomed romanticism Borzage was known for, make this a worthwhile movie that holds up surprisingly well.

Next at Kennedy Center: Cynthia Erivo and Friends: A New Year's Eve Celebration (John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On New Year’s Eve night (Sunday, December 31) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of TV music specials, one on PBS from Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and one on CBS from various locations in Nashville. The PBS one, rather awkwardly titled Next at Kennedy Center: Cynthia Erivo and Friends: A New Year’s Eve Celebration, featured singer Cynthia Erivo. Her “friends” were Ben Platt from the Broadway cast of the musical Dear Evan Hansen and Joaquina Kalukango from the Broadway cast of the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. (The musical has since been filmed, though Erivo isn’t in the movie and neither is Kalukango. I wonder what Alice Walker, who’s still alive at 79, thinks of the stage show or the musical film; she so hated Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie of The Color Purple she wrote a whole book about it, The Same River Twice.) Erivo began with a great song from 1968 that’s been virtually forgotten: “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know,” written by singer-organist Al Kooper for the first Blood, Sweat and Tears album, Child Is Father to the Man. (Kooper was fired from Blood, Sweat and Tears after that album, and their mega-hit was their second album, released in 1969, called simply Blood, Sweat and Tears and featuring Canadian singer David Clayton-Thomas in Kooper’s place.) That was really the high point of the evening; later she brought out Ben Platt and did a duet with him on the Nicholas Ashford/Valerie Simpson Motown classic, “You’re All I Need to Get By,” The song was originally written for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, who recorded a great duet version in 1968 that became a major hit. In this version, Erivo totally outsang Platt. Then Platt got a solo with an O.K. but rather droopy song called “Ease My Mind,” which he co-wrote with Jenn Dicilveo and Ben Abraham, and James Taylor’s “Your Smiling Face.” There have been great covers of James Taylor songs – Melanie’s astonishing “Carolina in My Mind” and Blood, Sweat and Tears’ “Fire and Rain” come to mind – but this wasn’t one of them: Platt’s blandness as a singer totally matched Taylor’s as a songwriter.

Then Erivo introduced her bass guitarist, Rickey Minor, and identified him as one of the “Friends” in the show’s title. She then did a song on which the competition is enormous: Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns” from A Little Night Music. The song as it’s generally performed out of context has a bittersweet ending, but when I actually saw a live production of A Little Night Music I was astonished that there’s a reprise of the song, with different lyrics, that would supply a far more hopeful and upbeat ending. Alas, nobody who does the song outside of the complete show does that part! Erivo was no exception, though at least she phrased what she did perform eloquently even though I couldn’t help but compare her to Sarah Vaughan, who on a February 1978 live broadcast to save San Francisco’s jazz radio station KJAZ sang the greatest version of “Send In the Clowns” I’ve ever heard. (She also sang a stunning version of the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers” on that same broadcast.) Erivo’s next song was “Let’s Stay Together,” written by Al Green, Willie Mitchell and Al Jackson in 1971. It was a hit for Green a year later and for Tina Turner in 1984 – and their two versions couldn’t be more different even though the lyrics remained the same. Green’s version is a ballad about romantic contentment sung in a smooth way that pays tribute to a happy and well-functioning relationship. Turner’s is a psychodrama in which the singer desperately pleads with her beloved to stay with her. Cynthia Erivo tried to steer a middle course between Green’s and Turner’s masterpieces and came up with something that was neither fish nor fowl, neither mellow nor wrenching. Then Erivo brought on Joaquina Kalukango and duetted with her on “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” the big hit for Roberta Flack in 1973 (though it was actually written by singer Lori Lieberman with Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel and inspired after Lieberman went to a concert by Don McLean, of all people). The extra voice really didn’t add much, but it was still a lovely song and Erivo and Kalukango did it justice.

Then Kalukango took the stage solo for a cover of a Natalie Cole hit from 1975, “This Will Be,” and an O.K. version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from the 1993 musical Sunset Boulevard. Though Don Black and Christopher Hampton wrote the lyrics, it’s such a generic Lloyd Webber power ballad I momentarily thought it was from The Phantom of the Opera. After that Erivo returned to the stage for “Let Me Go,” co-written by Mykal Gilmore with Gregory Dean Dubensky and sung by Gilmore as the opening track and first single from his album A Man Born Black. Erivo closed the show with “Nothing Compares 2 U,” originally written by the late Prince Rogers Nelson – though the world knew him only by his first name – though the hit was by Sinéad O’Connor. O’Connor’s version was chilling in its restraint; Erivo, by contrast, turned on all the soul-music devices and came up with a version far less interesting and powerful. I like Cynthia Erivo as a singer but I don’t think she always makes the best choices either of what songs to sing or how to arrange and perform them, and the show overall was a far cry from what it could have been.

New Year's Eve Live: Nashville's Big Bash (CBS-TV, Nashville Live Productions, 2023/2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Cynthia Erivo show on PBS ended just before 11 p.m., and then I put on the CBS New Year’s show, New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash. My husband Charles and I joined the show while it was already half an hour old, and I’d hoped that it would present a wider range of modern country-music artists than it did. Actually the two hours we watched were focused almost entirely on two acts, woman singer Lainey Wilson and 1970’s-era Southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd. The show – or at least the part of it we watched – opened with a Lainey Wilson song called (I’m only guessing here because few of the song titles were actually announced) “It’s Only Because I’ve Lived Through Hell.” Then Kane Brown came on to do “Bury Me in Georgia” (a song title I’m sure of because it was announced) before Wilson returned with “Had Enough” and a duet with Jackson Dean called “I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love.” That song also featured a quite good woman guitar player named Grace Bowers, whose solo was actually the best part. Then the show cut to another venue – a bar (virtually all the satellite venues were bars, some of them quite famous, which figures given that drinking, especially drinking to get over a romantic or sexual breakup, is one of the main themes of country music and always has been) – for a great performance by Cody Johnson. Though Johnson’s bass player is tall, rail-thin and built like a stringbean, all the other band members – including Johnson himself – are hot, sexy Bear types (yum!). Johnson sang a song whose title I couldn’t quite figure out but I noted down, “If You Don’t Like the Way I’m Living, Just Leave Me Alone.” It was a nice screw-you to all the moralists who like to tell other people how to live. Then the show cut to other bars for other performers like Morgan Wallen with Trombone Shorty (the song was called “It Ain’t My Fault” and it was actually quite good, though Shorty’s trombone interjections didn’t add much) and HARDY (according to his Wikipedia page, the name is supposed to be spelled in all caps), who got his start opening for Wallen on tour and he’s also written for Lainey Wilson and Blake Shelton.

HARDY actually got to do two songs, one called “The Wrong Side of the Truck” from his album The Mockingbird and the Crow and another called “By the Way, My Name Is … Jack.” Aside from HARDY’s two songs and a piece by Old Dominion which I noted down as either “She’s Gone for the Summer” or “I Was On the Phone That Day,” the second half of the show belonged to Lynyrd Skynyrd, or what’s left of them because their last surviving founding member, guitarist Gary Rossington, died in March 2023. Given that all the original members are dead, which started with the legendary plane crash in 1977 that took the lives of original singer Ronnie Van Zant (his brother Johnny took his place) and guitarist Steve Gaines, the band members apparently debated over whether they should continue as a group but ultimately decided to go ahead with their tour plans. The rump Lynyrd Skynyrd did some of the band’s biggest hits over the years: “What’s Your Name?,” “Sweet Home Alabama” (on which Lainey Wilson joined them), “Gimme Three Steps,” “A Simple Man” (a quite haunting ballad and not at all what you’d expect from Lynyrd Skynyrd) and the inevitable “Free Bird.” Lynyrd Skynyrd has a Right-wing political reputation largely from “Sweet Home Alabama,” which the band members wrote as a response to Neil Young’s “Southern Man” and includes the lines, “Watergate don’t bother us none/Does your conscience bother you?” In 2009 Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded a song called “God and Guns,” written by country songwriters Mark Stephen Jones, Bud Tower and Travis Meadows, and made it the title track of their then-newest album. I heard them play it on an episode of Austin City Limits and hailed it as the greatest Right-wing song since Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” in 1969, and as much as I loathe its politics it’s still a great song and I wish they’d done it on the New Year’s Eve show. (One irony is that two of Skynyrd’s original members, Ronnie Van Zant and bassist Ed King, had written a song in 1974 called “Saturday Night Special” that condemned gun violence.) The show ended with the “note drop” indicating it was 2024 in Nashville (which is in the Central time zone and therefore New Year’s was an hour later than it was in New York), along with the Times Square ball drop an hour earlier, and Charles and I rang in the new year with our usual toast of sparkling cider (since I don’t drink alcohol) and an uncertain outlook as to whether this will indeed be a good new year.

Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Eve Concert (ORF, TV Skyline, Vienna Philharmonic, PBS-TV, December 31, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, January 1) my husband Charles and I watched the 90 minutes PBS vouchsafes us of the annual New Year’s concert in Vienna given by the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikvereinsaal. These concerts started in 1939 when the Vienna Philharmonic’s conductor Clemens Krauss decided the people of Vienna needed a “fun” musical event to make up for the heaviness of the news, particularly the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria by Nazi Germany the year before. So he played a concert of mostly waltzes, polkas and other dance music by the Strauss family: father Johann Strauss, Sr. and his sons Johann, Jr., Josef and Eduard Strauss. The concerts stopped in the later stages of World War II but were revived and have become an annual fixture (and a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic, which every year releases CD’s and DVD’s of the concerts). The American telecasts have been hosted by various celebrities, first Walter Cronkite, then Julie Andrews (whose only connection to Austria is having starred in the film The Sound of Music, which of course was set in Salzburg, not Vienna!) and now British actor and Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville. (Blessedly, he pronounces the “t” in “often.”) The 2022 and 2023 concerts seemed to be in part an attempt to reinvent the Strauss family for the #MeToo era by focusing more on the music of Josef Strauss, a good little husband who didn’t seek out extra-relational activities, rather than his more famous and flamboyant brother Johann Strauss, Jr., who apparently played around a lot. This time, though, the concert swung back the other way; of the 12 pieces performed during the concert (or at least during the portion PBS broadcast, since the Austrian TV network ORF sends out a recording of the complete concert, along with B-roll sequences of various Austrian tourist attractions that can be spliced into it, but the outlets in other countries decide for themselves just what parts of the footage to air) six were by Johann, Jr., two by Josef, one by Eduard and three by non-Strauss composers.

One of these was German composer Carl Michael Ziehrer: the “Vienna Citizens’ Waltz,” which he wrote for a battle of the bands with the Strauss orchestra at a new ballroom just opening in Vienna in the 19th century. Like the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the 1930’s, this ballroom had two stages so they could have two bands playing alternating sets and the music would never stop. Though Ziehrer’s group was primarily a military band, it won the contest and the “Vienna Citizens’ Waltz” became a city standard. The other two non-Strauss works were “Happy New Year Galop” by Danish composer Hans Christian Lumbye, a contemporary of Johann Strauss, Sr. and often called “the Danish Strauss”; and a “Quadrille” by, of all people, Anton Bruckner. Bruckner’s reputation today stems largely from his symphonies; there are nine “official” ones, of which the last is incomplete because Bruckner didn’t finish its final movement, as well as a symphony Bruckner discovered in his papers and, having already published a Symphony No. 1, when it was prepared for publication Bruckner was asked what it should be called and he said, “Just call it ‘Die Nullte’” – “The Zero”, and an early student symphony which eventually got published as “Study Symphony.” Bruckner’s symphonies are very long, complicated, exist in many versions (thanks to Bruckner’s notorious indecision as to just how they should go) and strike me as way too overextended for their rather meager musical material. So it was a real surprise to see him turn up on the program of a Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, though the “Quadrille” ran true to form in that, even though it was only 12 minutes (still relatively long for a piece of light music), it was starting to overstay its musical welcome towards the end.

Instead of presenting Josef Strauss as the exemplar of marital monogamy and therefore the morally superior one of the Strauss brothers, the 2024 concert focused on Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef, who took the throne in December 1848 as part of a settlement of the various revolutions that year and ruled until his death in 1916, in the middle of World War I (an event Franz Josef’s imperialistic ambitions had done a lot to bring about). Franz Josef married his German cousin Elisabeth Wittelsbach, sister of “Mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria, in 1854, when he was 23 and she was 16. The two had a long and happy relationship (though according to Franz Josef’s Wikipedia page he was a lot more in love with her than she was with him; in her youth she’d been a tomboy and an amateur hunter and she never acclimated to the formal life of the Austro-Hungarian court) until she was assassinated in Italy by an anarchist in 1898. Whatever the ins and outs of their real relationship, this show – especially Bonneville’s commentary – presented it as a love story for the ages, and focused largely on Ischl, the suburb of Vienna where there was a famous bathhouse people used for the supposedly health-restoring powers of the warm salt water. Ischl was also the site of the palace where Franz Josef and Elisabeth spent their happiest times until so many of their children died she started wearing nothing but black and remained in a state of perpetual mourning. The program opened with the overture to Johann Strauss, Jr.’s operetta Waldmeister (“Forest Master”) and then played the “Ischl Waltz” and “Nightingale Polka” (complete with flute sounds meant to emulate the twittering of the titular birds) by Johann, Jr.; the “Mountain Spring Polka” by Eduard (meant to celebrate the building of a new infrastructure project to bring badly needed water to Vienna via one of the mountain springs on the royal properties) and the “New Pizzicato Polka” again by Johann, Jr.

After the Ziehrer, Bruckner and Lumbye pieces (in that order) the Vienna Philharmonic played Josef’s “Deliriums Waltz” (written for a medical convention) and “Jockey Quick Polka” (“jockey” as in horse-racing riders, since Josef was reportedly very fond of the sport) before the inevitable encores: Johann, Jr.’s “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (with its obligatory halt after the first few bars so the Vienna Philharmonic members can bark out, “Prosit Neujahr!” – “Happy New Year!”) and Johann, Sr.’s “Radetzky March.” This year’s conductor was Christian Thielemann, an old-style German musician with a noticeable lack of a sense of humor, which may have been why some of the pieces tended to drag a bit. One of the traditions is that in the “Radetzky March” the audience is supposed to clap along in unison to the music – one year my husband Charles was so impressed at the audience’s skill he turned to me and joked, “How come in America we got all the white people who can’t clap?” But even more than most conductors who play this concert, Thielemann decided to conduct the audience, gesturing at them when to start clapping and when to stop. It’s a tribute to how well the Vienna Philharmonic members know this music that they stayed together even when Thielemann was facing away from them so he could conduct the audience instead. It was also welcome to see how many women musicians were in the ranks of the Vienna Philharmonic, especially since it was the last major orchestra in Europe to stop discriminating against female musicians.

Spaceballs (Brooksfilms, MGM, 1987)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 31) Turner Classic Movies rang out the old year by showing a night of spoof films, including Mel Brooks’s Star Wars spoof Spaceballs; Top Secret! (1984), Jim Abrahams’s and Jerry and David Zucker’s send-up of both espionage films and Elvis movies (I’m not making this up, you know!) and the immediate follow-up to their mega-hit film Airplane!; Rob Reiner’s 1984 heavy-metal parody This Is Spinal Tap; a spoof of rap called Fear of a Black Hat and the 1977 omnibus film Kentucky Fried Movie (also an Abrahams-Zucker-Zucker production). TCM host Ben Mankiewicz explained, in a surprisingly liberal political comment for TCM, that the network was scheduling parody movies for the end of 2023 because “the last eight years” politically have been a parody. (No real surprise there since Ben’s father Frank Mankiewicz was Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.’s last press secretary and wrote two of the best books on Watergate while it was going on, Perfectly Clear and U.S. vs. Richard M. Nixon.) We watched the first three of those, though I’m not going to comment on This Is Spinal Tap because I’d already written about it (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/09/this-is-spinal-tap-spinal-tap.html) for moviemagg on September 5, 2022 and don’t really need to do so again. Spaceballs remains a particular favorite of mine mainly because the Star Wars mythos is already so inherently silly it didn’t need much “pushing” to get it into the realm of outright comedy.

Before the screening TCM host Ben Mankiewicz quoted Brooks as saying that in order to satirize something you first have to love it genuinely and sincerely. He said that about Young Frankenstein, which really did showcase Brooks’s reverence for the original Frankenstein movies (particularly The Bride of Frankenstein, which was already pretty spoofy) and which he insisted on shooting in black-and-white and using the original Frankenstein lab equipment designed and built by Kenneth Strickfaden to reproduce the “look” of the originals as closely as he could while still creating a very, very funny film. I don’t think Mel Brooks likes the Star Wars movies that much, but that doesn’t get in the way of him making a very funny and clever parody. I have two quarrels with Brooks and his co-writers, Thomas Meehan and Ronny Graham: for some reason they combined the characters of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo into one, “Lone Starr” (Bill Pullman, who’s right up there with Mark Hamill and the young Harrison Ford in the sexiness department). They also didn’t include an R2-D2 (a bit of a pity since he/she/it was one of the most obviously silly aspects of the original), though the job they did on C-3PO (more on that later) more than makes up for it. But that didn’t bother me once we got into the movie, with its weird bits of frame-breaking (in one scene the villains find out where the good guys they’re chasing are by renting a videotape of the movie; later on Brooks spoofs the merchandising of Star Wars by emblazoning virtually every prop in the film with the Spaceballs logo; and later the famous scene in which the good guys realize that the people they’ve helped escape are not the stars but their stunt doubles, and the person doubling for “Princess Vespa” is a male, and a male with a Hitler moustache at that) and its overall irreverence.

From the opening title crawl, with the exposition titles receding into space and ending with, “If you can read this, you don’t need glasses,” to the overall plot and situations – Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) is being forced by her father, King Roland of Druidia (Dick Van Patten, under so much heavy makeup that through much of the movie I thought Mel Brooks was playing him; Brooks has actually two other roles in the film, as evil President Skroob of the planet Spaceball and the all-knowing sage of the universe, Yogurt), to marry Prince Valium (Jim J. Bullock), a pretty-boy “type” obviously modeled on the newspaper comic Prince Valiant. Only she can’t stand the idea of marrying someone who literally keeps falling asleep all the time, so (in a scene I think Brooks stole from the opening of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1930 musical Monte Carlo, with Jeanette MacDonald and Jack Buchanan) she bails out on the wedding and flies off into space, thereby unwittingly giving the villains the opportunity to kidnap her. The villains include Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis – and the idea of him enacting a character played in the original Star Wars by hulking British actor Anthony Powell and voiced by James Earl Jones), his assistant Col. Sandurz (George Wyner) and a cast of Assholes – just about every crew member in the Death Star is from a family whose last name is Asshole, and at one point Dark Helmet complains, “I’m surrounded by Assholes!” They want to kidnap Princess Vespa in order to force her father to give them the password to open the secret airlock over Planet Druidia that will allow them to steal all its air and move it to Planet Spaceball. The super-secret password turns out to be “12345,” which in the age of personal computers (and easily hackable passwords for them) is even funnier now than it was in 1987.

The Brooks/Meehan/Graham script did a superb twist on C-3PO, calling her “Dot Matrix” and having her voiced by Joan Rivers and enacted in the metal suit by Lorene Yarnell of the husband-and-wife mime duo Shields and Yarnell. And the writers encompass quite a few other movies, including not only the Star Trek franchise (President Skroob tries the teleporter and ends up with the lower half of his body twisted so his asshole is on the same side as his face) but the Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Wizard of Oz (Yogurt makes his appearance in a grand hall with a giant statue of himself), Lawrence of Arabia – in the trek of Lone Starr, Princess Vespa, Barf (John Candy), the “mog” (half-man, half-dog) who takes the Chewbacca role, and Dot Matrix make through the desert planet, they’re accompanied by Maurice Jarre’s music from the David Lean epic – and even It Happened One Night (King Roland finally decides Lone Starr is a suitable husband for Princess Vespa when he, like Clark Gable’s character at the end of the Capra classic, turns down the one-million-spacebucks reward he’d offered for Vespa’s safe return and asks that he be reimbursed only for his actual expenses), as well as the famous scene in Alien in which the alien emerges from its latest victim’s stomach. In Brooks’s version the alien gets there from someone ordering the “special” at the Cantina Bar, and our heroes – including Barf – quickly change their orders from the “special” to other less blatantly toxic items on the menu. Meanwhile, the alien itself puts on a top hat, picks up a cane and escapes doing a song-and-dance number to “Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey, Hello My Ragtime Gal.” Now that’s funny – and typical Mel Brooks humor.

Top Secret! (Kingsmere Companies, Paramount, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next parody movie up on TCM’s agenda was Top Secret!, a film whose weird genesis was explained by Ben Mankiewicz in his intro. It seems that Jim Abrahams and Jerry and David Zucker were at a loss to follow the enormous commercial success of their previous spoof Airplane! (1980) and couldn’t decide on their next project. They thought of doing a parody of World War II movies, James Bond-style espionage thrillers, and rock ‘n’ roll movies including the awful ones Elvis Presley churned out on Col. Tom Parker’s orders in the 1960’s. So they ultimately decided to write a script containing all of them. Unfortunately, while Airplane! had benefited from a relatively strong script based on a serious air-disaster movie, Zero Hour! (1957), Top Secret! was an original whose plot line never quite gelled, despite some quite funny moments. Abrahams and the Zuckers also decided to implement one of the key elements of Airplane!’s success: casting an actor who until then hadn’t been known for comedy, In Airplane! it was Leslie Nielsen, whose image was so altered by the A-Z-Z-team’s use of him that he became a deadpan comic for the rest of his career (throwing audience members who watch the 1956 dead-serious sci-fi film Forbidden Planet and realize midway through they’re not supposed to find Leslie Nielsen funny). Here it’s Omar Sharif, who unlike Nielsen doesn’t at all make the transition from serious (more or less) actor to comic relief. It doesn’t help that Sharif is playing an underwritten role, “Agent Cedric,” or that through most of the movie it’s not clear which side he’s on.

Also, for some reason, Abrahams and the Zuckers decided to set the movie in “East Germany” (just five years before East Germany ceased to exist as a nation, though of course the writer-directors had no way of knowing that was going to happen!) but gave it all the trappings of Nazism: the swastika insignias some of the officer characters wear, the streets named after Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels (in the real East Germany streets were named after people like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Walter Ulbricht, East Germany’s founding chancellor), and the “Goering Exercise Book” shown in one scene (one of the film’s better sight gags if you remember that the real Herrmann Goering was very, uh, large). The plot deals with German scientist Dr. Paul Flammond (British actor Michael Gough), who’s being held in an East German prison because he won’t work on a program to develop a super-submarine that could make East Germany rulers of the world, or something. Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer, in his feature-film debut and showing off a quite good singing voice; later he’d play bona fide rock star Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors and, though most of the singing in that film was Morrison’s own from The Doors’ records, Kilmer sang for himself in a few bits they couldn’t cover from the records) is a pretty-boy rock star who’s just become an international sensation with a song called “Skeet Surfin’.” It’s a parody of The Beach Boys, drawing on “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Little Honda,” “Hawai’i,” “California Girls” and “Do It Again,” and apparently all the parts were sung by Val Kilmer and ex-Turtle, ex-Zappa singer Mark Volman. It might have been funnier if The Beach Boys had done it themselves (eight years earlier they’d contributed a great theme song to the marvelously funny spoof Americathon, “It’s a Beautiful Day,” about a dystopia in which cars have become houses since gas is prohibitively expensive and walking and bicycling have become the main modes of transportation), but it’s still a great scene and the video depicting it – in which people literally shoot at clay pigeons while riding surfboards, and one of them accidentally downs an airplane – is one of the funniest scenes in the movie.

Alas, the plot rears its head as Nick Rivers is invited by mistake to a cultural festival in East Germany, and he’s thrown into the same prison as Dr. Paul Flammond. He tears up a staid German nightspot with a surprisingly good cover of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” in which the German musicians get into the spirit. Then he gets arrested and meets Dr. Paul, only he’s rescued by the local U.S. attaché and Paul’s daughter Hillary (Lucy Gutteridge). Hillary is a leader in the local Resistance and is organizing a commando raid to free her father – the commandos have silly names, most of them derived from foods: Potato (Sydney Arnold), Croissant (Paul Weston), Escargot (Mark McBride) and a Black fighter inevitably named Chocolate Mousse (Eddie Tagoe). They need Nick to come along on the raid because he’s the only person who’s been in the prison before and therefore knows where the baddies are keeping Dr. Paul. There’s been a Blue Lagoon spoof in which the young Hillary’s past is revealed (and she’s played by Mandy Nunn): she was stranded on a desert island with a young blond hottie named Nigel (Lee Sheward). The two have a blissful idyll on the island for two years or so until he’s rescued by a ship while she’s left on the island and ultimately rescued by someone else. Unfortunately, Nigel (played by Christopher Villiers in his older incarnation) turns out to be the traitor in their midst – it turns out the vessel that rescued him was Russian, and they gave him an ideological education that caused him to shift sides in the class war – thereby short-circuiting the Casablanca-style ending the writer-directors were pushing towards in which Nate would nobly relinquish Hillary to the person she needed to be with because she was part of his work. Instead Nate and Hillary flee to the U.S. with Dr. Paul.

There are some great scenes in Top Secret!, including the Blue Lagoon parody, a scene set at a Swedish bookstore whose owner is played by veteran character actor Peter Cushing, and a bizarre bar fight that takes place entirely underwater. Though it’s not clear how the characters are able to breathe, it occurred to me that this is what the Aquaman movies should have looked like (and maybe someone will parody them). But overall Top Secret! isn’t as good a movie as Spaceballs (or Airplane!, for that matter), mainly because the characters aren’t all that interesting and the story doesn’t make that much sense. It also didn’t help that there’s a sequence featuring a Russian ballet company in which the male dancers all have huge erections under their skin-tight trousers, a cheap sex joke I really didn’t think was all that funny – not even when one of the ballerinas stood on one of the mega-hard-ons and balanced herself on one leg.

The Searchers (C. V. Whitney Pictures, Warner Bros., 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, December 30) Turner Classic Movies showed a tribute to the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Awards that included a screening of The Searchers, a 1956 Western directed by John Ford, written by Frank S. Nugent, and based on a novel by one Alan Le May (a writer otherwise unknown to me). The Searchers is a film I really wanted to watch because, though it got “meh” reviews at the time – Variety praised Ford’s direction but said it was “not sufficient, however, to overcome many of the weaknesses of the story” – in later years it’s been re-evaluated big-time. It’s been called both John Ford’s and John Wayne’s best film; it regularly makes the decennial Sight and Sound poll of the 10 best movies ever made; and it’s become a key work to the Ford cult. Well, guess what: the original reviewers were right, for a change, and the later critics were wrong! I have rarely been as disappointed by a movie I’d had high hopes for than I was by The Searchers (I think the last time I had this reaction was at the review screening of Brokeback Mountain in 2005). Basically, The Searchers is a revenge tale in which Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) comes back to his Texas home in 1868 after having served in the Civil War (on the Southern side, of course!) and then apparently spent three more years on the battlefields of Mexico fighting as a mercenary in the war with France (though it’s not all that clear that that’s what happened to him – it’s mentioned on the film’s Wikipedia page but not in the movie itself – let alone what side he fought on, and the only hint of his post-Civil War activity is a bag full of Union $20 gold pieces he carries and is evasive about just how and where he got them). He’s there to visit his brother Aaron (Walter Coy), Aaron’s wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan, whose husband Merian C. Cooper produced the film), and their daughters Debbie (Lana Wood) and Lucy (Pippa Scott). Only just as soon as he arrives and then briefly rides off on an errand, the Edwardses are attacked by a party of Comanche Indians led by “Scar” (Henry Brandon), also known as “Cicatriz” because that’s the Spanish word for “scar.” Aaron is killed, Martha survives and her daughters are kidnapped and enslaved by the Comanches. The rest of the movie is a tale of revenge in which Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a young man whose parents died and abandoned him in the desert until Aaron Edwards took him in and raised him as his son, set out after the Comanches who took Debbie and Lucy. (Ethan and Martin find a scrap of cloth from an apron Lucy was wearing when she was abducted, and deduce from this that she is dead.)

The film begins to go wrong from the very start; though the story is supposed to take place at various locations throughout Texas and the Southwest, Ford chose to film it at his favorite stamping ground, Monument Valley, Utah. The reason was to take advantage of its spectacular scenery, including the famous elevated mesa that figures so prominently in Ford’s films. Only the photography by Winton C. Hoch and Alfred Gilks is just too beautiful, too picture-postcardy (the film was shot in Technicolor, which may have been one of Ford’s biggest mistakes; this doom-ridden tale really needed red-filtered black-and-white to work on screen in 1956), and the skies too blue and cloudless. One aches for a sense of drama in the landscape to match the darkness of the story, and instead one gets ravishingly beautiful and totally wrong-headed desert vistas. Another big problem with The Searchers is the horrible comic-relief subplot dealing with Swedish immigrant Lars Jorgenson (John Qualen), his wife (Olive Carey, widow of Harry Carey, one of Ford’s favorites; their son Harry Carey, Jr. is also in this movie) and their daughter Laurie (Vera Miles), who’s engaged to Martin Pawley until Martin leaves her literally for years on end to follow Ethan on his single-minded revenge quest through the Southwest. The third problem with this film is John Wayne: in Howard Hawks’s Red River (also a film that pairs him with a younger, studlier actor, but a far better one than Jeffrey Hunter: Montgomery Clift) eight years earlier he’d shown unexpected depths in his acting. In fact, John Ford himself had complimented Hawks on the performance he got out of Waye and told him; “Who would have thought that the big guy had that much in him?” I suspect part of John Ford’s motive in making The Searchers was to showcase John Wayne’s acting skill in a film with his name on the director’s credit, but the part of Ethan Edwards is just too far beyond Wayne’s reach as an actor. I can think of other actors at the time who could have played it far better – Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, even Arthur Kennedy – who had played similar characters in revenge-themed Westerns (Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur’s Blood on the Moon, 1948; Stewart in Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73, 1950; Kennedy in Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, 1952).

There are also real political problems with this movie, not only in its romanticization of the Confederate cause (in one scene a part-time minister and part-time Texas Rangers captain attempts to draft Ethan into his company, and Ethan says the only oath he ever swore was to the Confederacy) but especially in the treatment of Native Americans. Though sometimes surprisingly progressive in other ways (notably his skepticism about capitalism), Ford was a thoroughgoing racist in his depiction of Native people. He tried to correct that in his next-to-last film, Cheyenne Autumn (1964) – also a film with a potentially great concept that got horribly botched in the execution – and in The Searchers Ford and Nugent insert a line for “Scar” that says he’s targeting and scalping white people as revenge for all the Native lives white settlers have taken. But that’s just a blip in the overall message that “Indians” are mindlessly evil (when I saw the films of The Lord of the Rings I compared Peter Jackson’s treatment of the Orcs to John Ford’s Indians), to the point where once they find Debbie – who’s now a grown woman and played by Natalie Wood (quite well, too) – Ethan is ready to shoot and kill her on the ground that having lived with (and been a sex slave to – they couldn’t come right out and say that under the Production Code but Ethan strongly hints it) the Comanches, she’s no longer a white woman and therefore she doesn’t deserve to live. If The Searchers has any real merit, it’s as a powerful drama of post-traumatic stress disorder; the term “PTSD” didn’t exist yet but it’s clear from the story that both Ethan Edwards and his niece Debbie have it and are among the “walking wounded” from its traumas. But that was an aspect of the story John Ford, Frank S. Nugent and the other people involved in the making of this film did not seem all that interested in, and the film has a disappointing and inconclusive ending in which Martin Pawley marries Laurie after all (I was hoping he’d marry Debbie, who even though they grew up together is not his biological kin, and help heal her from her PTSD) and Ethan walks off into the proverbial Western sunset, turning his back on the rest of humanity, or at least that part of the rest of humanity that actually has any reason to give a damn about him.