Killer's Kiss (Minotaur Productions, United Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, December 13) I watched four films in a row – three features and a short – on Turner Classic Movies. The first two, Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955) and Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall (1956), were presented as one of the channel’s double bills co-introduced by regular host Ben Mankiewicz and Rosie Perez, actress and dancer who was invited because she frequents boxing matches so often she’s been referred to as the “Queen of Boxing” and both movies were about boxers. Killer’s Kiss was Kubrick’s second film, and like his first, Fear and Desire (1952), was produced on the proverbial shoestring. Most of the money came from Bronx pharmacist Morris Bousel, who gets co-producer credit with Kubrick, and it was largely shot on location in New York City. It’s definitely a film noir and its romantic leads are Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a burned-out boxer whose best days in the ring are behind him even though he’s just 29 years old, and dance-hall hostess Gloria Price (Irene Kane). Ironically, the actor who receives top billing is Frank Silvera, playing gangster Vince Rapallo, who owns the dance hall where Gloria works and is infatuated with her. The story is a simple one: Davey has just lost his latest bout with a fighter named Kid Rodriguez when he returns to his ratty Manhattan apartment and sees Gloria from her window in the building next door. (One wonders if Kubrick and his co-writer, Howard Sackler, were influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, released just one year before Killer’s Kiss was shot.) Davey has already accepted his fate and plans to move back to Seattle, where his aunt and uncle raised him, and work on their horse ranch. (This evokes John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, in which the character played by Sterling Hayden desperately wants to return home to the horse ranch where he grew up, and just barely makes it before he dies of the wounds he got in a shoot-out. Later Hayden would work for Kubrick in The Killing, in a role strongly similar to the one he played in The Asphalt Jungle, and in Dr. Strangelove.)

Alas, when he hears Gloria scream from her window, he spies Rapallo attempting to rape her, and Rapallo is angry and vows revenge. Rapallo has two of his henchmen kill Davey’s manager and frame him for the crime, distracting Davey with two other men, disguised as Shriners, who steal Davey’s scarf and force him to chase after them to retrieve it. There’s a chase scene across New York rooftops during which both Rapallo and Davey injure themselves (apparently Frank Silvera and Jamie Smith both hurt themselves for real) before the two men finally confront each other in a mannequin factory, where they attempt to beat each other to death with the mannequins. Ultimately the police arrive and decide that Davey killed Rapallo in self-defense, exonerate him for the murder of his manager, and send him on his way to Seattle. In a happy ending the distributors, United Artists (who gave Kubrick $10,000 in completion money), insisted on, Gloria meets him at the Pennsylvania Station (the fabled locale mentioned in the song “Chattanooga Choo Choo” which was demolished in 1963) and goes to Seattle with him just after Davey, in a typical voice-over film noir narration, laments over what a fool he was to let a woman he’d known for only two days so totally upend his life. There’s also an odd scene in which ballerina Ruth Sobotka, then Mrs. Stanley Kubrick, dances a quite elaborate scene while Gloria narrates a dialogue flashback. Sobotka is playing Iris, Gloria’s late older sister, who turned her back on a promising ballet career to marry a rich man who demanded she retire. She did so because their father had become catastrophically ill and needed expensive medical care, and when dad finally died two years later, Iris, lamenting the loss of her career, committed suicide. What’s most interesting about Killer’s Kiss is the intimations of later Kubrick films: there’s a long dream sequence of Davey careening through the streets of New York, shot in negative film, that evokes the long traveling shot of Jack Nicholson on his way to the New England hotel that opens The Shining, while the final scene in the mannequin factory couldn’t help but remind me of the scene in A Clockwork Orange in which Alex (Malcolm McDowell) kills the woman he’s just raped by beating her with a phallic statue in her home.

The film was well received enough that United Artists continued working with Kubrick on his next film, The Killing, also a film noir but with, if not A-list, at least A-minus-list actors (Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr.). Variety gave it a mixed but generally positive review at or around the time of the original release (there’s an intimation that the anonymous reviewer had seen at least The Killing by this time, for s/he refers to Killer’s Kiss as “a warmup for Kubrick’s talents”): “Ex-Look photographer Stanley Kubrick turned out Killer's Kiss on the proverbial shoestring. Kiss was more than a warm-up for Kubrick's talents, for not only did he co-produce but he directed, photographed and edited the venture from his own screenplay and original story [originally written by Howard Sackler]. … Kubrick's low-key lensing occasionally catches the flavor of the seamy side of Gotham life. His scenes of tawdry Broadway, gloomy tenements and grotesque brick-and-stone structures that make up Manhattan's downtown eastside loft district help offset the script's deficiencies.” Kubrick was his own cinematographer, and some of the striking noir images he got have become familiar through TCM’s recycling of them on their introductions. Alas, Killer’s Kiss is not terribly well acted; Frank Silvera is convincing in his villain’s role but both Jamie Smith and Irene Kane (who later reverted to her original name, Chris Chase, and became a writer) deliver their lines in monotones that suggest they’ve just started acting classes. Part of the nervous delivery may be due to Kubrick’s decision to have all the dialogue post-recorded, as he had on Fear and Desire, Originally he was going to do conventional live on-the-set recording, but he decided the mikes were getting in the way of his visuals, so he banished them and shot the whole thing silent with sound added later. (Kubrick was never a big one for extended dialogue scenes. On his greatest film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, he used dialogue for only 42 minutes of the 127-minute running time.)

The Harder They Fall (Columbia, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Turner Classic Movies’ second boxing movie on their double-bill Saturday, December 13 was The Harder They Fall, made by Columbia Pictures in 1956 and based on an anti-boxing novel Budd Schulberg had published in 1947. Schulberg had hoped to get the assignment to write the script, too, but producer Philip Yordan pulled rank on him and wrote it himself. He also made one dramatic change in the material: originally the character of Eddie Willis (Humphrey Bogart in his final film) ends it by writing an article that begins, “Boxing must be outlawed in the United States, even if it takes an act of Congress to do it.” In the film as it stands now the final line he types is, “The boxing business must rid itself of the evil influence of racketeers and corrupt managers, even if it takes an act of Congress to do it.” The change was made at Budd Schulberg’s insistence, since in his 1971 book Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali he said he’d only meant to call for the reform of boxing, not its abolition altogether. The Harder They Fall, directed by Val Lewton veteran Mark Robson (and it shows in a scene in which gangsters corner a fighter who refused to take a dive when he’d been paid to in a gym shower and beat him to death, and Robson depicts it with a scene of bloody water trickling out of the shower, copped from Lewton’s and Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man), deals with Eddie Willis, a long-term sportswriter who lost his regular column when the New York newspaper he wrote for went out of business. He’s contacted by gangster Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) to do P.R. for a scam Benko has cooked up: he’s signed a deal with Argentinian boxer Toro Moreno (Mike Lane) who looks formidable – he weighs 278 pounds, 60 to 70 pounds more than a typical heavyweight – but has, as Willis put it after he sees him with his African-American sparring partner George (played by real-life boxer Jersey Joe Walcott), “a powder-puff punch and a glass jaw.”

Benko and his corrupt henchmen set up a series of fixed fights in which Toro will win by knockouts and build up a reputation as a contender for the heavyweight championship. Despite the misgivings of his wife Beth (Jan Sterling, five years after her incandescent performance as the faithless femme fatale in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Ace in the Hole; alas, she’s largely wasted her in her typical good-wife role) and his old friend Art Leavitt (Harold J. Stone), a TV sportscaster who catches on that Toro’s first fight was fixed, Willis takes on the job. Meanwhile, the heavyweight championship for which Toro is being promoted changes hands as contender Buddy Brannen (another real-life boxer, Max Baer) defeats reigning champion Gus Dundee (Pat Comiskey) and leaves Dundee with a concussion. In Toro’s next fight with Dundee, as a warmup for his championship bout with Brannen, Dundee dies from his previous injuries and Toro is convinced that he killed him. Homesick, bereft of his original manager Luis Agrandi (Carlos Montalbán) whom Benko sent away, and upset by a note he’s received from his parish priest back in Argentina that his father is dying, Toro wants to quit the ring and return home to be with his sick father. But with the championship fight with Brannen already arranged, Benko and his gang are determined not to let Toro leave the country and bail out on his big bout. First they have five people corner him with chains and try to beat the shit out of him – Toro’s helplessness in the face of these thugs, as well as the scene in which he was first introduced and he clumsily bumped into an overhead light fixture, tell us all we need to know about his utter haplessness as a fighter – and then Willis corners him in a church (whose pastor is played by legendary voice actor Paul Frees) and talks him into going ahead with the Brannen fight because there’ll be a major pay envelope waiting for him after it.

Meantime Brannen has formed a personal grudge against Toro over the claims that it was he, not Toro, who inflicted the fatal blows against Dundee. Benko’s men have told Brannen to go easy on Toro for six rounds to make it look competitive, but the furious Brannen refuses and opens up on Toro almost from the get-go and totally humiliates him. Toro ends up in a hospital with his jaw badly fractured and wired shut, which doesn’t stop Benko from selling Toro’s contract to an equally corrupt manager, Jim Weyerhause (Edward Andrews), for $75,000. Weyerhause figures he can make his money back touring the hapless Toro in the counties in which he won his fixed fights and allowing the local boys to clobber him, but in the meantime Willis determines (in the classic arc of a Bogart character who lost his ideals in the backstory but regained them in the finale) to help Toro get out of the country as soon as he’s well enough to travel. When Willis goes to Benko to get his and Toro’s shares of his earnings, he gets an envelope containing $26,000 but is told that after all the deductions for expenses, all Toro has coming to him is $49.07. Willis gives Toro his own share of the proceeds and then announces his intention to Benko to write a series of articles exposing the corruption of the fight game. Benko threatens him but then realizes that a man who’d give away $26,000 out of a sense of righteousness is someone who can’t be corrupted, bribed, or intimidated.

The Harder They Fall was a good movie for Humphrey Bogart to go out on; it’s tough, well-made, gives Bogart one last change to portray nobility regained, and the reported real-life antagonism between him and Steiger adds verisimilitude to the story. Bogart made no particular secret of his distaste for the Method and the actors who practiced it – he referred to it as the “scratch-your-ass-and-mumble school” – and in this movie we see Steiger throwing himself into his role with all his Method affectations and Bogart taking the acting honors with his simple, direct Old Hollywood professionalism. One aspect of this film that irritated me on previous go-rounds was the cheesy “Latin” theme composer Hugo Friedhofer inflicted on us every time Toro’s tour bus is shown on screen, though most of the music is actually quite good even though it’s a functional rather than an expansive score: one which works in the context of the film even though it doesn’t generate great music on its own. Robson’s direction and Burnett Guffey’s cinematography are good enough to serve their purposes – this is an exposé, not a film noir, though the basic story had potentials for noir atmospherics that weren’t realized or even attempted (notably in the scene in which Willis is on the phone to his wife Beth and a woman sneaks into his hotel room and puts her hand on the phone cord, thereby hanging up the call; we momentarily believe that Willis is going extra-relational on Beth, but that’s about the farthest thing from his mind at the moment) – and for some reason, even though he was about to be diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him in early 1957, Bogart actually looks healthier here than he had in Beat the Devil two years earlier.

The Lady and the Lug (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Oddly, after The Harder They Come on Saturday, December 13 TCM showed a 20-minute short called The Lady and the Lug (1940) that was also about the boxing game and in particular about a hapless would-be fighter who’s totally hopeless in the ring. The Lady and the Lug was a vehicle for the celebrated party hostess Elsa Maxwell, who plays herself. Her nephew Doug Abbott (future TV Superman George Reeves) has just won, in a poker game, the management contract of would-be boxer Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom (also playing himself). Maxwell hits on the idea of staging a boxing exhibition at her latest benefit for the Milk Fund (a common charity in the 1930’s which existed to raise money for babies from poor parents to have access to milk; it’s still around, by the way, albeit under various names) between Rosenbloom and championship contender “One-Punch” McGurk (Frank Hagney). Maxwell trains with Rosenbloom and paces him during his running workouts, which he keeps trying to cut short because he gets too tired, and when Rosenbloom finds out whom he’s going to be fighting in the big Milk Fund bout he wants to bail, At this point we’re probably wondering why Maxwell doesn’t put her nephew in the ring instead – “He is from Krypton, after all!” I couldn’t resist joking to myself – but instead she talks Rosenbloom into getting into the ring after all. Only McGurk decides to fight dirty, so Maxwell throws off her society duds, gets into the ring herself, and knocks out the would-be champ. Directed by Warners’ “B”-meister William McGann from a committee-written script (Owen Crump and Jack Henley, “original” story; Charles R. Marion and Arthur V. Jones, screenplay), The Lady and the Lug is a charming little curio that, among other things, showed Warners’ cluelessness about what to do with George Reeves. He signed with the studio around the same time they picked up another tall, lanky, barely coordinated young actor named Ronald Reagan, who of course went on to even bigger and arguably better things than George Reeves did!

Cash on Demand (Hammer Films, Woodpecker Productions, British Lion, Columbia, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Eventually my husband Charles returned from work last night (Saturday, December 13) an hour earlier than expected and therefore he got to watch with me the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” screening of a really quirky 1961 crime thriller from Hammer Films, Cash on Demand. Directed by Quentin Lawrence from a script by David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer from a play by Jacques Gillies, Cash on Demand came about after one of Hammer’s biggest stars, Peter Cushing, served notice on the studio that he was tired of rehashing Universal’s big monster properties and wanted something else. Cushing and André Morell, a key supporting player in this one, had already done an adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959 (Cushing thus became the first actor to play Holmes on screen since Basil Rathbone hung up the deerstalker after his last Holmes film, Dressed to Kill, 13 years earlier). For this one Cushing was cast as Harry Fordyce, imperious manager of the bank in Haversham, Buckinghamshire, southern England, and Morell as Col. Gore Hepburn, who shows up claiming to be an examiner for an insurance company but is really a crook determined to rob the Haversham Bank of 90,000 pounds without doing anything as crude as sticking up the place or blowing out its safes. Gore Hepburn puts Fordyce and his clerk, Pearson (Richard Vernon), through the wringer on this one, winning Fordyce’s cooperation by telling him his gang are in his home and have wired electrodes around his wife to immobilize her forever if he gets out of line. Gore Hepburn gets Pearson to take his suitcases out of his car (an Aston-Martin, whose poshness becomes a major running gag in the story), though there’s a glitch in the plan when he finds that Pearson doesn’t drive (like me!) and therefore someone else will have to move the car from the 20-minute zone it’s parked in to the bank’s own lot.

All this takes place on Christmas Eve and a snowstorm suddenly starts (“Cue the corn flakes!” I joked; ground-up and white-painted corn flakes were a common movie substitute for snow in the early days) and inconveniences the bell-ringing Santa Claus impersonator who’s doing his thing just outside the bank. Pearson and a younger bank staff member have already called the insurance company – the real one – and learned that the real “Gore Hepburn” is an impostor. Fordyce pleads with them to cancel the call to the police in fear for his family, but the cops show up anyway, recognize Gore Hepburn as a well-known crook, and arrest him. It turns out that Fordyce’s wife and child (whom we never see, though we briefly hear their voices on the soundtrack and they’re visibly present through framed photos on Fordyce’s desk) were in no danger after all. Gore Hepburn hired a voice impersonator to record “their” voices on tape and play it over the phone to Fordyce to fool him. For a while I thought where this was going was that the cops would arrest Fordyce as Gore Hepburn’s “inside man” and he’d be unable to convince them that he was only helping rob his own bank under duress, but in the end they’re convinced by his story and the experience leads Fordyce to conclude that he’s been way too much of a martinet boss and he should be more collegial and forgiving towards his staff. This film is a particular favorite of Eddie Muller’s, who regards it as a modern-day reworking of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with Fordyce as Scrooge and Gore Hepburn as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Both Charles and I found the parallel too forced to be believable, but Muller has taken a major role in rehabilitating this film’s reputation, including raising money for a full restoration. Like a lot of other Hammers, the film lost a considerable amount of running time (it got 22 minutes shorter) between its British release in 1961 and its U.S. debut a year later. Charles was also surprised it was in black-and-white instead of Hammer’s usual Gorycolor, and I couldn’t help but think when Gore Hepburn mentioned having connected Mrs. Fordyce to “electrodes” that Peter Cushing was probably thinking, “Oh, here we go again.” (Actually, in The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer’s first Frankenstein film, Peter Cushing created his Monster in a giant aquarium – a prop that was reused for The Rocky Horror Picture Show – instead of electrodes connected to lightning rods or kites the way Colin Clive had in James Whale’s Frankenstein films.) Cash on Demand is a quirky little thriller, not at all film noir but a nice little exercise in suspense that probably gave Peter Cushing the change of pace he was hoping for and was a nice little audience-pleaser.

I Want My '80's! (Springfield Brothers, Imaggination, Inc., 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the 1961 Hammer movie Cash on Demand was over on Turner Classic Movies Saturday, December 13 I switched over to KPBS for a pledge-break special called I Want My ’80’s! which I figured my husband Charles would be interested in because he’s a much bigger fan of 1980’s pop music than I am. (That’s the nine-year generation gap between us again; I was born in 1953, he in 1962, and therefore I have living memories of the 1960’s and its music that Charles doesn’t. Once we were talking about Janis Joplin, of whom I have living memories even though I never got to see her live. Charles said, “To me, Janis Joplin has always been dead.”) I Want My ’80’s! turned out to be a concert presentation in which Rick Springfield was the headliner and Wang Chung and John Waite were basically his opening acts. Springfield got six songs during the show, which ran for an hour and a half though only about 45 to 50 minutes were actual performance, and Wang Chung and John Waite got three songs each. I’d never heard of John Waite before, actually – if I’d heard the name back then I’d probably have assumed it meant either John Hiatt or Tom Waits – but he presented himself as a solid singer-songwriter whose three songs, “Change,” “When I See You Smile,” and “Missing You,” were powerful if unexceptional pieces of pop-rock. I had heard of Wang Chung before and I had at least one of their CD’s, the soundtrack album for William Friedkin’s 1985 Los Angeles-set thriller To Live and Die in L.A. I got that after I’d read about it in Fanfare magazine because in the 1980’s Royal S. Brown was doing a regular column about film music and that was one of the albums he was obliged to review. He joked in his article that he had originally thought “Wang Chung” was a single Chinese or Asian-descended musician instead of the nom de groupe of two young Britishers, Jack Hues (true name: Jeremy Ryder) and Nick Feldman. Actually there was a third group member, Darren Costin, who left after their second album. According to their Wikipedia page their name means “Yellow Bell” in Chinese and is also the first note on the Chinese musical scale. Royal S. Brown also joked that his younger son had threatened him with bodily harm if he didn’t like the Wang Chung To Live and Die in L.A. album. Fortunately for him, he did. The CD was originally an LP release which contained four vocal tracks on side one and four instrumentals used as soundtrack cues in the movie on side two.

The three songs Wang Chung did on I Want My ’80’s! were “Dance Hall Days,” “Let’s Go,” and “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” which famously incorporated the group’s name into the lyric: the chorus went, “Everybody have fun tonight. Everybody Wang Chung tonight.” (The band’s name was originally Huang Chung, but when they signed with Geffen Records, David Geffen suggested they change the spelling to “Wang Chung” to make it easier for Westerners to pronounce.) I’m not sure which Wang Chunger was which, but one of them had considerably shorter hair and was playing a normal guitar while the other had longer, bushier hair and was playing one of those oddball guitars with a quadrilateral body and no visible tuning pegs. (I wonder how he keeps it in tune.) Also the longer-haired Wang Chungster was wearing a black T-shirt which had writing on it; it was too bunched up on his body to make the writing totally legible but it appeared to say “Wang Chung Are Fucking Metal!!!,” with the “a” in “metal” replaced with the anarchist symbol. Charles told me that one of them was classically trained, and I’m guessing it was the short-haired one because his voice had weathered the years considerably better than his partner’s. After three songs by Wang Chung and three by John Waite, Rick Springfield came on and turned out to be surprisingly well preserved, both physically and vocally. No, he’s not the same cutie he was in the early 1980’s when he was at the peak of his fame, but he looks quite good and without the careworn lines that had started to afflict Mick Jagger’s face at a comparable age. He’s also a quite good guitar player and a capable singer whose voice was almost as good as it was in the 1980’s. Charles said he wondered what Rick Springfield’s voice would have sounded like “in the day” without the benefit of studio production, and as luck would have it I had a chance to do a comparison.

On July 5, 1981 I had recorded a TV broadcast (through a direct connection, though I can’t remember whether I was recording off a TV itself or off a radio station that was doing a simulcast) of an outdoor concert in Long Beach with The Beach Boys as the headliners and Rick Springfield, Three Dog Night, and Pablo Cruise as their opening acts. I had dubbed my original cassette to CD and dug it out to play for Charles, and he agreed with me that the 1981 Rick Springfield and the 2025 Rick Springfield were surprisingly close in timbre and overall pitch control. Springfield’s songs were “Affair of the Heart,” “World Starts Turning,” “State of the Heart,” “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” “Love Somebody,” and his star-making hit, “Jessie’s Girl.” (The big line of that song was, “I wish that I had Jessie’s girl,” and of course being me I did a Gay rewrite: “I wish that I was Jessie’s girl.” Later Charles told me that he, like I, had been perplexed at the spelling of the name “Jessie,” which is usually the woman’s version. Charles joked last night that it was about a man trying to break up a Lesbian couple!) For “Affair of the Heart” Springfield wore a spectacular jacket with a sunburst pattern printed on the front. For the next four songs he took off the jacket and performed in a plain black T-shirt, and for “Jessie’s Girl” – which he played in a 10-minute version that had at least as many false endings as Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” – he took his shirt off completely and played topless. Given that he’s 75 years old (he was born August 23, 1949 in Sydney, Australia and the show was taped as part of a multi-city tour that also featured Paul Young and John Cafferty), he’s quite impressively preserved (certainly far better than I am!), and his voice is also solidly preserved and in good shape for the driving power-pop that is his stock in trade musically. Charles said he remembered watching, and considerably disliking, the 1984 movie Hard to Hold, in which Springfield played a rock star who falls in love with a woman psychiatrist whose only musical interests are in classical. He said he’d endured the movie and later he found that his sister Taun, who’d seen it separately, actually walked out on it. And this was supposed to be the big stroke for his acting career that would get him out of the General Hospital soap-opera ghetto, which it didn’t. But it was still nice to hear Rick Springfield again and notice how good he still is, even though he’s probably suffered under the long-term comparisons between him and the far more creative and talented Bruce Springsteen based only on the similarity between their names!

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "The Power of Steam" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, All3 Media International, Acorn, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, December 12) my husband Charles came home from work in time to join me in watching an episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, that quirky crime show based (and shot) in New Zealand. The lead characters are Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), a heavy-set police detective in the Brokenwood area of New Zealand, and his police partner Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland, who gets to dress quite hotly in black denim and leather pants that cling quite tightly to her body). It was already established in previous episodes (this one first aired November 10, 2019, and led off the show’s sixth season) that Shepherd had been married either three or four times previously – even he can’t remember just how many ex-wives he has – and also that he’s a huge fan of country music, much of it created locally (who knew New Zealand had a thriving local country-music scene?). Not surprisingly Mike has been hitting on Kristin, and equally unsurprisingly Kristin has the good sense to avoid any involvement with him “that way.” This episode was called “The Power of Steam” and made both Charles and I unusually interested in it because it centers around a steampunk convention. Needless to say, there’s a lot of back-and-forth arguing between the police characters, including hunky young detective Sam Breen (Nic Simpson, who also co-wrote the script with series creator Tim Balme), over just what steampunk is. Steampunk is just a pretext to set the mystery at a convention that supposedly happens every year but had never been heard of before by the police – the old Midsomer Murders strategy. The convention is co-chaired by the appropriately named Lionel (John Leigh) – the name is appropriate because he makes his living running a model-train store in town – and Alden Coombes (Andrew Grainger), who makes his living running a hot-air balloon flying service. Lionel ends up dead when, in the middle of a giant fireworks display using illegally obtained fireworks (we hear a lot about how dangerous they are but most of them turn out to be duds), a port-a-potty (or “port-a-loo,” as they’re called in the British English-speaking world) explodes spectacularly with him inside it.

It turns out that someone stole a tank of propane gas from Alden’s storage shed, sealed up the ventilation holes in the port-a-loo, ran a pipe from the tank into the loo, and locked it from the outside so no one inside it could get out. The suspects include Lionel’s daughter Poppy (Beth Alexander); Cleo (Zoë Robins), the young Black (or is she Native?) woman whom Poppy is in a Lesbian relationship with; Elsa (Geraldine Brophy), a middle-aged woman hanger-on in the steampunk scenes even though she loudly proclaims her disdain for the whole phenomenon; her learning-disabled son Bart (Dan Weekes), who works as an assistant at Lionel’s train store and had a history of childhood diseases which force him to take medications that, among other things, make him pee a lot; and the owner of the port-a-loo concession, who drank absinthe at the festival and therefore had some bizarre hallucinations that complicate matters for the police. The police learn that Lionel and Alden were having arguments just before Lionel was killed, mostly over Lionel’s attempts to blackmail Alden over the mysterious death of his wife iin a ballooning “accident” a decade earlier, and Lionel had threatened to kill Alden. Alden was severely injured in the blast and ended up in the local hospital, where he lost (or pretended to lose, we’re not sure which) all memory of the night Lionel was killed. But he makes a spectacular escape on a bicycle, which he rides through town, before the police finally corner him on his balloon, where they threaten to shoot out the hot-air bag and therefore cause the balloon to plummet to earth. Alden gets the message and insists that the cops arrest him because he’s fearful of the loan sharks from whom he borrowed money to keep his balloon business afloat (or should I say “aloft”?), though it turns out the loan-sharking gang he borrowed from were already taken into custody elsewhere and therefore were no threat to him. The police briefly suspect that Alden, not Lionel, was the intended victim – though the night of the murder Lionel had actually used the women’s port-a-loo because Alden was hiding out in the men’s.

They also learn that Bart, Lionel’s assistant at the model train store, joined an online group for “incels,” short for “involuntary celibate”: young straight guys who lament that they can’t find women willing to have sex with them and frequently ratchet that up to a hostile distaste for women in general. “Incels” reached the public awareness when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California on May 23, 2014, killing six and injuring 14 others before taking his own life. Before he went on his rampage, Rodger posted a video to YouTube in which he “said he wanted to punish women for rejecting him, and sexually active men because he envied them.” From this the police deduce that [spoiler alert!] Bart was the killer, and he did so in an elaborate mistaken-identity scheme. His real target was Cleo, Poppy’s Lesbian girlfriend, and his motive was he’d had a crush on Poppy but she’d not only rejected him, she’d done so in favor of a woman, and a woman of color at that. (Lionel himself had a history of making both racist and homophobic comments, and the script makes it powerfully ambiguous about whether Lionel was more bothered about Poppy dating a woman or Poppy dating a person of color.) My heart sank when I realized they were going to make the “incel” the killer, especially since I once told a friend of mine that the photos of incels I’d seen made me regret that people can’t choose their sexual orientation; maybe women aren’t interested in them, but at least some of them look attractive enough they’d do well in a Gay bar. Bart rigged the trap first by grinding up some of his diuretic pills, then giving Cleo a beer spiked with them, and in a bizarre bit of mistaken identity he ended up targeting Lionel instead of Cleo because not only was Lionel in the women’s restroom, he was wearing the hat he’d made for Poppy and Poppy had in turn given to Cleo, only Lionel had reclaimed it and was wearing it himself because he was so upset that his love gift to his daughter had ended up on the head of his daughter’s girlfriend. The show was actually rather well done, and there was a nice comic-relief subplot in that throughout the show Mike Shepherd is shown dog-sitting a Corgi, famously Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite breed (a fact that of course doesn’t go unmentioned in the dialogue!), for (it eventually turns out) one of his ex-wives.

Oh, God! (Warner Bros., 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. yesterday (Thursday, December 11) I put on Turner Classic Movies for a screening of one of my light-favorite movies of the late 1970’s, Carl Reiner’s Oh, God!, a supernatural comedy in which Jerry Landers (John Denver, whom I never particularly cared for as a singer but turned out to be an effective deadpan comedian) receives a series of visits from God (George Burns at his avuncular best). Jerry is an assistant manager of a supermarket in Tarzana when God starts sending him messages, first as an unsigned, unstamped letter requesting an “interveiw” (so spelled) on the 27th floor of an L.A. office building that only has 17 floors. (In today’s world that can’t help but remind me of the scam Donald Trump pulled on unsuspecting prospective tenants in Trump Tower; he put out that the building had 10 more floors than it actually did. One wonders what he did with people who actually asked for space on one of the nonexistent floors.) Jerry at first assumes the invitation is a prank from a friend of his with a penchant for practical jokes, but when he actually shows up on the 27th floor and finds the building’s elevator won’t let him go anywhere else, he starts to believe. Oh, God! is based on a novel by Avery Corman, and to write the screenplay Reiner got Larry Gelbart, a fellow veteran of Sid Caesar’s writing room along with Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve referred to as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees” – he’s the grandson of Citizen Kane co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and the great-nephew of All About Eve writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz), Reiner was originally going to cast Mel Brooks as God, which Ben Mankiewicz thought would have been terrible. Gelbart not only wanted Brooks to play God but Woody Allen to play Jerry Landers, but Allen turned it down to make his own religious-themed comedy, Stardust Memrories.

Burns was already coming off a late-in-life comeback via the 1975 film of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys. Simon originally wrote this as a stage play about “Lewis and Clark,” an old-time vaudeville comedy team who were being reunited for a TV special even though they’d long since broken up in an atmosphere of mutual hatred. The original leads were Walter Matthau and Jack Benny, but Benny died just before shooting was scheduled to start and Benny’s long-time friend George Burns took over his part. This put Burns, who’d retired from performing in 1958 along with his long-time partner and wife Gracie Allen, on the cultural map again and helped land him the role in Oh, God! – and I remember joking when the movie came out that even a committed atheist like me (or at least me in 1977) could be happy to believe in God if he looked, sounded, and acted like George Burns. Jerry Landers has an ordinary suburban existence with wife Bobbie (Teri Garr, considerably less annoying than usual – when she played Richard Dreyfuss’s wife in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a lot of people joked that if I were married to Teri Garr, I’d get on an alien spacecraft just to get away from her!), son Adam (Moosie Drier, who looked surprisingly like John Denver and was totally believable as his son) and daughter Becky (Rachel Longaker). God’s instruction to him is to let the world know that He exists and is unhappy with the way we humans have made a mess of His creation, but instead of directly intervening as he did with Noah (you remember) he’s just going to let us sort it out. This was the biggest surprise about this movie re-seeing it now: the script takes an unashamedly and unabashedly Deist view of God, who created the universe and set it in motion but left humans in charge of it to do with it what they would. I’ve made the point several times that in the current American political climate, the Deists who for the most part wrote the United States Constitution wouldn’t have a chance of getting elected today, since Americans have come to insist not only that their leaders believe in God but that they believe in an activist, interventionist God who takes an ongoing role in the actions of humanity and can be appealed to through prayer.

When Jerry Landers gets his mission from God – who compares him to Moses, which leads us to the unspoken in-joke, “John Denver doesn’t look anything like Charlton Heston!” – he first tells his wife and children. Then he seeks an interview with the religious editor of the Los Angeles Times, which merits him just a brief, dismissive squib at the end of an article about various nutcases who believe they’ve seen Biblical characters in real life. Finally Jerry Landers gets booked on The Dinah Shore Show – with Shore playing herself and the guest immediately on before her is played by the film’s director, Carl Reiner – and he becomes both a national laughingstock and a cult figure. One woman comes to his home attempting to have sex with him, another woman who’s pregnant asks him to bless her baby, and various people show up on his front lawn, some of whom are TV news crew members and others carry signs and chant repeatedly. All this unwelcome attention makes Jerry desperate that he’ll get fired from his job, especially since the head of the supermarket chain for which he works is a religious nut who thinks Jerry is blaspheming the One True God by claiming to have a friendship with him. Jerry finally seeks an audience with a group of religious leaders at a Bible college, of whom the most obnoxious is a mega-church televangelist named Rev. Willie Williams (Paul Sorvino). The religious team gives Jerry a list of 50 questions for God, all written in Aramaic so Jerry can’t read them himself, and lock him in a hotel room whose TV is playing The Dick Van Dyke Show, a classic 1960’s TV series produced by Carl Reiner. (God looks at the TV and kvetches, “Too many repeats.”) God shows up in the guise of a room-service waiter and dictates answers to Jerry, who writes them down and assembles them in a packet which he intends to give Rev. Williams at a big revival meeting he’s holding at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium. Before Jerry confronts Williams at the Shrine, God has told him to denounce the reverend as a huckster who’s just making money off his congregants, and if he wants to make money he should sell shoes instead.

Jerry gives Williams God’s message, and he’s not only thrown out of the event but sued for slander by Williams. The case goes to trial and Jerry defends himself, much to the consternation of Judge Baker (Barnard Hughes). He calls God as his one and only witness, and after a bit of suspense as to whether He will really appear (it’s previously been established that only Jerry can see God), He does. There’s a great line in which George Burns is being sworn in as a witness, and when he’s supposed to repeat the line, “So help me God,” he says, “So help me, me.” God appears in court and speaks from the witness stand, but later when the official tape recording of the session is played back, God’s voice disappears not only from the tape but also from the official court stenographer’s record. Jerry finally gets fired, but he and his family set off in their AMC Gremlin (a truly bizarre car that becomes a character in itself) for parts unknown as God compares him to Johnny Appleseed, spreading seeds of faith wherever he goes. Produced (more or less) by Jerry Weintraub, Oh, God! was a surprise hit on its initial release and still holds up well today. Denunciations of religious hypocrites are nothing new; the Gospels are full of them (when the Metropolitan Community Church put out a leaflet headlined, “What Jesus Christ Had to Say About Homosexuality,” and when you opened it the leaflet was blank, I joked that if they’d put out a leaflet called “What Jesus Christ Had to Say About Religious Hypocrisy,” it would have to consist of at least half the Gospels), and with the U.S. currently being run by people who insist we should be a “Christian Nation” governed by strict Biblical morality, it’s nice to see a movie which presents a more humane version of God and faith. Oh, God! did well enough at the box office to merit two sequels: Oh, God! Book Two and Oh, God! You Devil, in the last of which George Burns played not only God but the Devil, the first time an actor had appeared as both in the same movie. Before him Max von Sydow had played Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and the Devil in Needful Things (1993), and before that Black actor Rex Ingram had played God in The Green Pastures (1936) and the Devil in Cabin in the Sky (1943). I remember seeing Oh, God! You Devil on its initial theatrical run with my then-partner John Gabrish, and enjoying it even though the target of the battle between Burns’s God and Burns’s Satan, aspiring rock musician Bobby Shelton (Ted Wass, who was cute enough I had a mini-crush on him even though his acting career pretty much went nowhere and since the mid-1990’s he’s worked mainly as a TV series director), hardly seemed worth it.