Live play review: “Learn to Be Latina” (Diversionary Theatre, 2011)

Diversionary’s Comic Romp

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Learn to Be Latina, Diversionary Theatre’s current production, is a comic romp that’s funny and entertaining start-to-finish. Enrique Urueta’s script is a satire on so many sacred cows that when Diversionary’s production finally opened for previews on November 13 — two days late, mostly because it took longer than expected to work out the show’s elaborate choreography — John Alexander, the theatre’s executive director, announced at the beginning, “If you’re not offended, it means we haven’t done our job.” Directed by Iris Saratial Misdary at a whirlwind pace that forces us to accept Urueta’s stylized plotting and character setting without giving us time to pick it apart for dramatic inconsistencies, Learn to Be Latina is a delightful skewering of our common notions of fame, ethnicity and sexual identity that leaves a lot of sacred cows butchered in its wake.

It begins in the offices of Funky Artists’ Development (the initials F.A.D. are prominently displayed on the back wall of Matt Scott’s effectively stylized set), a record company where three identically dressed executives, Bill (Dangerfield G. Moore), Will (Steve Smith) and Jill (Amanda Cooley Davis), are looking for the Next Big Thing. A potential Next Big Thing arrives in the person of Hanan Mashalani (Tamara Dhia), a Boston native and recent graduate of William and Mary College in Virginia, from which she emerged with a theatre arts degree, a heavy-duty student-loan debt, and a demo CD produced for her by a boyfriend who became an ex-boyfriend when she caught him in his dorm room taking it up the ass from a guy who, just to mix up the signals a bit further, Hanan thought had a cute ass of his own.

Hanan is also burdened with a problematic ethnicity. Though she’s U.S.-born, her parents were immigrants from Beirut, and in the post-9/11 era Lebanese = Arab = terrorist. One of the show’s funniest scenes, in fact, is a bizarre parody of post-9/11 stereotyping in which Bill, Will and Jill immediately switch their perception of Hanan from potential dance diva to potential suicide bomber, hiding under their desk in cowering fear when she tries to fetch her bag and doing an hilarious re-enactment of the attack on the World Trade Center. So they call in the company’s fearsome “ethnic consultant,” Mary O’Malley, MBA, Ph.D. (Faeren Adams), who’s so scary that in Keven Anthenill’s sound design her entrance is heralded by the opening of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. What happens next will be obvious to anyone who’s bothered to notice what the play is called, but Urueta teases us with it for several minutes until O’Malley finally blurts it out. Hanan, it seems, is “the wrong shade of brown,” but that can be dealt with if only she can — you guessed it — “learn to be Latina!”

The ethnic remodeling includes a name change — the brain trust at F.A.D. decide that if they just drop Hanan’s last name and put an accent over the second vowel in her first, “Hanán,” she’ll sound suitably Latina — plus Spanish lessons from O’Malley’s omnipresent hand puppet Calcetina (who speaks in an accent Adams seems to have got from watching Lupe Vélez’s old “Mexican Spitfire” movies) and a multiple-choice test designed to measure her “Latina I.Q.” The test questions, projected for us in PowerPoint, have some of the same ridiculous ethnic stereotyping that’s made Gustavo Arellano’s syndicated column “¡Ask a Mexican!” a delight. The one person in the F.A.D. operation they don’t turn to for how-to-be-a-Latina advice is the one genuine Latina present, “office bitch” Blanca (Olivia Espinosa), who not only has the real ethnicity Hanán is trying to adopt but also has a raging crush on her (well, it’s a Diversionary production so there had to be Queer characters in it somewhere!) and wins her heart — or at least her body — through their shared interest in an obscure 1980’s TV show called Gem.

Learn to Be Latina is performed in two acts, and needless to say, during the intermission Hanán skyrockets from unknown to instant superstar. Her first single, a remake of an obscure dance tune called “Latin Heat” by 1980’s mini-phenom La Juana (who didn’t even last long enough to be a one-day wonder: she went from fame in the morning to obscurity by noon), soars to the top of the charts. So does her first album, which Urueta almost inevitably saddles with the ironic title For Real. She’s still unhappy, though, not only because the star-making machinery is carrying her farther and farther away from who she wanted to be and what sort of music she wanted to make but also because she has to live in mortal fear of being “outed” as a Lebanese, a Lesbian or both. It all comes to a head the night she’s scheduled to appear on the Grammy Awards, and …

Along with the laughs, Learn to Be Latina offers scathing social commentary on the transitory nature of fame and the extent to which we accept blatantly false and transparently silly tales about celebrities. Sometimes we take these corporation-created figures to our hearts, sometimes we want to burn them at the stake (“You Americans!” Rudolph Valentino complained in 1923, “You build up stars just for the fun of tearing them down”), and sometimes we follow them with the same sick fascination with which we watch auto accidents (what else were we doing with Michael Jackson for the last decade of his life?). We’re willing to accept what the corporate machine tells us they are, then we react with ferocity and rage when we find out they’re not like that at all.

The characters in Learn to Be Latina change ethnicities — or at least ethnic signifiers — at the drop of a thin dime. Their sexual orientations are equally malleable, as they are in real life and aren’t in the “born that way” mythology of the Queer mainstream (ironically the exit music is Lady Gaga’s recent hit of that title!). From the moment they’re introduced we’re told that Bill is married (heterosexually) and Will is Gay, but throughout the play there’s a running gag of them sneaking out of the office together — when one has to go to the bathroom, the other always accompanies him — for reasons we figure out in a microsecond even though the other characters remain oblivious to the end. The ethnic masquerades continue when Hanán gets booked for an interview on Elena — she’s called “the Latina Oprah” and that’s how Faeran Adams, who doubles the role, plays her — and gets confronted with a photo of herself and Blanca making out. “I’m not Lebanese! And I’m not a Lesbian, either!” Hanán blurts out, thanks to a playwright delighting in the similar sound of the words for both her forbidden identities.

Learn to Be Latina is really a tour de force for the women in the cast. Though she isn’t given an opportunity to perform as a singer or dance diva — and therefore we’re never sure whether Hanán is a genuinely talented musician being forced into a rancid commercial mold or a no-talent being built up into manufactured stardom (i.e., whether she’s Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears) — Tamara Dhia is fully the mistress of her role. She superbly manages the transition from scared wanna-be to frustrated superstar, babbling her lines at rapid-fire pace as the former and managing the spaced-out look and demeanor of the latter. She’s matched superbly by Adams, who as O’Malley is a really formidable and relentless villain; and by Espinosa, who as the one truly likable character in the whole piece supplies the earth-mother grounding Urueta clearly intended. Espinosa is also credited as “dance captain,” whatever that means, while Anna Sarao gets a choreography credit; they both deserve accolades for getting non-dancers to move as to the manner born.

Matt Scott’s set design is simple and effective, though it works better in the first act than the second. Michelle Caron’s lighting is functional and appropriate, though she’s not as challenged as she would have been if the script had included an actual Hanán performance. Raquel Barreto’s costume designs include appropriately sleazy outfits for Dhia to wear as the public Hanán, a forbidding black pantsuit for O’Malley, and entertainingly unisex business drag for Bill, Will and Jill. Luke Olson’s “projection design” offers engaging PowerPoint shows that satirize business presentations. Sound designer Kevin Anthenill seems to have a collection of virtually every mediocre dance record made in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and he even makes the overused Carmina Burana music work. Learn to Be Latina is a start-to-finish delight whose satire steals in on you while you’re busy laughing at its more outrageous gags, and Diversionary has done it full justice in this engaging production.

Learn to Be Latina runs through Sunday, December 18 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Boulevard in University Heights. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursdays (except November 24) through Saturdays and 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays (no evening performance November 20). Tickets $31 Thursdays & Sundays, $33 Fridays and Saturdays. For tickets and other information, call (619) 220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org

Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (California Newsreel, 2003)

S.A.M.E. Presents Dec. 13 Showing of Bayard Rustin Biopic

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) and the Peace Resource Center are presenting a special screening of Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a 2003 documentary about the pioneering Black Queer activist who issued the original call for the 1963 March on Washington at which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The showing will take place Tuesday, December 13, 6:30 p.m. at the Peace Resource Center, 3850 Westgate Place in City Heights.

Rustin — whose name, incidentally, was pronounced “BYE-ard,” not “BAY-ard” — was a pacifist in the 1940’s who went to prison rather than serve in the U.S. military during World War II. He was also a Black civil-rights activist and a Gay man who lived long enough to come out as such and even make a statement shortly before the end of his life in 1987 that whereas in the 1960’s Blacks had been the cutting edge of the civil rights movement, by the 1980’s it was Queers who had taken that role. Rustin was a counselor to Dr. Martin Luther King, though the two men broke not only over Rustin’s sexual orientation and King’s fear that it would taint the movement but also because they took opposite positions on the war in Viet Nam.

Though a woman who knew Rustin attended a screening of the film at the San Diego Public Library in 2003 and said she had marched with him in 1961 in New York City on the first-ever protest in the U.S. against the Viet Nam war, the man who had gone to prison rather than fight in World War II refused to oppose the Viet Nam war in the late 1960’s. The film explains Rustin’s tacit support of the war as partly due to his friendship with President Lyndon Johnson and partly because he believed that a stand on the war would only detract from the civil rights issue — quite the opposite of Martin Luther King’s position, which was that opposing the war was just as much a part of his moral witness as opposing the segregation and oppression of his own people, and was therefore an issue on which he could not compromise.

Thanks largely due to his otherwise inexplicable refusal to come out against the war in Viet Nam, in the late 1960’s Rustin became the living symbol of Black accommodationism and the man the militant “Black Power” activists most loved to hate. The film included clips from two filmed debates Rustin had with Black Power leaders, one with Malcolm X in 1962 and one with Stokely Carmichael in 1967. In the latter, Rustin criticized the Black Power movement for calling on Blacks to carry guns, arguing that it was insane for people to arm themselves with rifles and knives and think that was going to defend them against a government armed with bazookas and tanks. Carmichael in turn attacked Rustin for being willing to work within the Democratic Party, arguing that America’s two major parties were both “evil” and Blacks needed to stop making “lesser of two evils” choices at the ballot box. It’s a debate as old as two-party politics in America; it goes at least as far back as the formation of the Free Soil Party in the 1840’s by abolitionists who weren’t willing, as people like Abraham Lincoln were, to align with the Whig Party as the lesser of two evils on slavery.

A peculiar aspect of Rustin’s career was his arrest in 1953 in Pasadena for having sex with two other men in a parked car — which was used against him for the rest of his life (the film includes a 1963 clip of racist Senator Strom Thurmond using it to denounce Rustin as a “pervert”) and which no doubt contributed to his disinclination to stand in the limelight and his withdrawals from the King circle and other positions where he thought the presence of a convicted sex criminal would detract from the civil rights issue. The film also covers his career as a singer (he sang backup vocals on Josh White’s 1940 album Chain Gang) and his late-in-life relationship with a white man one-third his age.

For more information on the screening, please call the Peace Resource Center at (619) 263-9301 or visit the S.A.M.E. Web site at www.samealliance.com

Contract on Cherry Street (Artanis/Columbia, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I picked out a movie our roommate John had just bought: Contract on Cherry Street, a rather peculiar 1977 TV-movie starring (and produced by) Frank Sinatra, in which he played the head of a special squad of New York City cops going after organized crime. He’s called “Deputy Insprector Frank Hovannes,” so at least he got to play a character whose first name is the same as his own, but “Hovannes” is a name that doesn’t really have any obvious ethnic referents and it might have been more believable if Sinatra’s character had been given an Italian-sounding name so at least we could have accepted him as what Sinatra in fact was. He’s equipped with slovenly dress (which must have driven the famously fastidious Sinatra crazy) and an on-screen wife, Emily, played by an actress named Verna Bloom who’s so boring one can’t understand what possibly keeps the two together — not that they spend that much time together since Frank spends virtually his whole life either at the police station or “in the field” going after one super-crook or another.

Among the members of his squad are Captain Ernie Weinberg (Martin Balsam), Ron Polito (Harry Guardino), Roberto Obregon (Henry Silva, looking more credible as a Latino than he did as an Asian in his previous film with Sinatra, The Manchurian Candidate, and in the short-lived attempt to revive the Mr. Moto franchise in 1965) and Lou Savage (Michael Nouri, who’s incredibly handsome in that dorky way of a lot of 1970’s Gay porn stars, complete with carefully tousled hair and skin-tight blue jeans that showed off his ass quite attractively and looked like they’d been appliquéd on instead of got into in the normal manner). The gimmick is that Polito is the squad-room hothead who wants to do some selective assassinations of Mafia leaders in order to start a full-blown war between New York’s two biggest crime families, the one run by Baruch “Bob” Waldman (Martin Gabel) and the one run by the Manzaros, an old Don sort of like the Marlon Brando role in The Godfather (from which director William A. Graham borrowed a great deal, not only the overall brown-toned cinematography but even the famous scene of the cars lined up to enter the Don’s estate, though in this case it’s for a funeral rather than a wedding).

The whole plot kicks off when we see a fancy car being stolen and stripped for parts — and in a movie that already has an ample beefcake quotient we get even more hot-looking men in the garage where they’re stripping the car with all the alacrity of a school of piranhas attacking a human in the water (one Latino-looking man who works with his shirt off is especially fun to watch and drool over). It turns out that this car-stripping business is owned by Waldman — he’s even got it incorporated and legally registered — but he’s being pressured to sell it to the Manzaros, led by a father and son in which, as has become a cliché in Mafia fiction, dad is level-headed and wants to avoid trouble while sonny-boy Eddie (Marco St. John) is rarin’ to take the bait and start a war. Also in the dramatis personae are the various hit men the two rival mobsters hire, including African-American Otis Washington (Johnny Barnes), who’s got a hot, butch physique and a high, almost squeaky voice with jars both with his body and his reputation for being pretty psycho; and Tommy and Mickey Sinardos (Tommy is played by the singer Jay Black of Jay and the Americans, while Mickey is played by Robert Davi, yet another cute guy who gives Michael Nouri a run for the money in the inspiring fantasies in straight women and Gay men department), Greek-American hitters who also have a reputation for craziness and overkill.

Eventually, about midway through this rather odd movie, officer Polito knocks off Manzaro lieutenant Al Palmini (James Luisi) and starts on a killing spree; apparently we’re supposed to believe that once he’s tasted blood he goes totally psycho and decides he just likes to knock people off, including a police informant — a twitchy junkie named Jack Kittens (Richard Ward) — and eventually he knocks off cutie-pie Lou Savage (damn!) and his wife. It all comes to a head in a shoot-out on Cherry Street (ya think?), in which the ambiguously ethnic Frank Hovannes knocks off the two Greek hit men but gets killed himself in the process. Written by Edward Anhalt — a writer with far more prestigious credits than this one (The Boston Strangler, The Madwoman of Chaillot, Jeremiah Johnson, Luther, The Man in the Glass Booth, The Day Christ Died and Peter the Great) — based on a novel of the same title by Phillip Rosenberg, Contract on Cherry Street is very flatly directed by William A. Graham, who completely refuses to give it the neo-noir treatment the story seems to demand — until the final scene, taking place at night and rich in chiaroscuro atmospherics and skewed camera angles and strongly anticipatory, especially in its nihilism, of the final scene in L.A. Confidential (the cinematographer was Jack Priestley and it’s a real pity director Graham didn’t let him shoot the whole movie that way instead of just the last scene). The music is by Jerry Goldsmith, but don’t get your hopes up about that; instead of the dark, rich orchestrations of classic noir it’s the overly bouncy orchestral pop that afflicted a lot of attempts to revive noir in the 1960’s and 1970’s (including Harper, Marlowe and the otherwise quite good Madigan).

The acting is also serviceable rather than great; there isn’t a standout performance the way there was in some other crime thrillers at the time (like Moses Gunn’s superb work in Shaft, which shamed the rest of the cast) and everyone is at least competent but no one is really great. Sinatra is powerful and authoritative but the script doesn’t stretch him at all — it’s a one-note role and he sings the one note superbly but one wishes he could have been given a more conflicted character like the starring roles played by Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda in Madigan. Harry Guardino is solid as the psycho cop but there’s no hint in the script that Guardino could use to make us believe why this particular person would go so far off the rails. Michael Nouri was so hot to look at I frankly didn’t care whether he could act at all or not, and the actresses playing his and Sinatra’s wives were both quite dull — the idea that some strong female roles could help the believability even of a combination police procedural and Mafia potboiler seems to have been foreign to Messrs. Graham, Anhalt, Rosenberg and, for that matter, Sinatra, who seems to have come up with this project for himself mainly because he’d made the mistake of turning down Dirty Harry (though it’s hard to imagine him as Harry Callahan, and not just because Clint Eastwood made the part so thoroughly his own: Sinatra would have had two drawbacks — too old and too short) and after his late-1960’s attempts to assume the private-eye mantle of Humphrey Bogart (Tony Rome, The Detective, Lady in Cement) he seemed to have decided that playing official law-enforcement officers was the way to salvage his career. (He might also have been trying the George Raft strategy of casting himself as a policeman fighting the Mafia in hopes of once and for all quashing the rumors that he was on the Mob’s payroll himself.) Be that as it may, the studio credit for this movie goes to “Artanis Productions” — “Artanis,” in case you didn’t notice, is simply “Sinatra” spelled backwards — with Columbia (and now Sony) as the distributor.

Contract on Cherry Street isn’t an especially exciting thriller — the lumbering large sedans of the period are simply too slow-moving on the straights and too cumbersome in the turns to enable director Graham (or anyone else) to stage an exciting car chase (there’s a reason why, in the two most famous car chases in movies of the period, Bullitt and The French Connection, the stars drove sporty muscle cars instead of big sedans that couldn’t really race unless they got the full NASCAR treatment) and director Graham is quite good at getting nice performances from his bit players but not so good at suspense. It’s a forgettable artifact of Sinatra’s career and recommendable only to Sinatra fanatics and people who want to do the time-warp to the late 1970’s; the glimpses of the interior of Studio 54 (where a key early scene takes place) and of Times Square in the pre-Giuliani porn days are welcome.

Edda Ciano and the Communist (Casanova Multimedia, RAI, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s movie at the San Diego Italian Film Festival proved to be surprisingly good, even though a little contrived and a lot too sentimental, a mismatched-lovers story set in 1946, in the aftermath of World War II and the run-up to the referendum in which Italians had a chance to vote on whether to restore the monarchy or declare a republic. They voted for a republic, but the vote was a good deal closer than I’d thought it was from previous sources: 12 million-something for the republic and 10 million-something for the monarchy (the Italian kings, the Savoys from Sicily, had been compromised in the minds of many Italians for their closeness to Mussolini and fascism). The film was called Edda Ciano and the Communist, and the “Edda Ciano” in the dramatis personae was indeed the daughter of Benito Mussolini and the (by then widowed) husband of Count Galeazzo Ciano. Galeazzo Ciano was executed by the Italian Fascists in 1944 after he turned against them, and in particular against the alliance with Nazi Germany which Ciano, in his pre-war post as Italy’s foreign minister, had largely been responsible for creating in the first place.

Edda escaped to Switzerland with the couple’s three children (one of whom later wrote a memoir called When Grandpa Had Daddy Shot) but was brought back to Italy after the war and interned in the town of Lipari, Sicily, where she was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for aiding Fascism. At least according to this film, however, she was freed after the July 2, 1946 referendum because the new Italian government no longer considered her a threat. In the meantime — and this is the part the filmmakers, director Graziano Diana (who originally had been scheduled to speak at the Italian Film Festival showing, but canceled when he got an opportunity to make another movie back home) and his co-writers, Stefano Marcocci and Domenico Tomassetti, invented — Edda (played in the film by Stefania Rocca) had an unlikely love affair in Lipari (where she was pretty much free to go when and where she pleased, as long as she didn’t leave town) with local Communist leader Leonida Bongiorno (Alessandro Preziosi). The filmmakers were more interested in matters of the heart than in politics — they didn’t have the characters debate their differing views of the world and the people in it — and they deliberately kept pretty sketchy just what drew these two unlikely lovers together.

They also didn’t show much campaigning on the referendum even though it seemed likely (at least to me) that the Communists would have taken an active role in bringing out the vote for the republic — but what they did do was tell a quite remarkable human story about how two people forge a connection in the unlikeliest circumstances possible. Made in 2011 and presented as a TV-movie on imdb.com (the Italian state broadcasting company RAI was one of the co-producers) — though it was shot in wide-screen (and the Italian Film Festival screwed up the presentation and showed it in 1.33:1 aspect ratio, which made the people too tall and skinny and the cars too short) — Edda Ciano and the Communist is strongest showcasing Edda’s own conflict between her lover and the one thing that means more to her at the moment than he does: reuniting with her children, who were still in Switzerland. (At one point she sends him out of the country to the villa in Switzerland where they’re staying and asks him to bring back some books — and he has to perform a fast shuffle with the box containing them to make sure they’re not searched or confiscated when he returns with them.) The political conflicts are there, but they’re understated and presented simply and subtly — notably in a remarkable scene in which Edda, released from detention in Lipari, moves to Capri and invites Leonida to visit her there; he gets as far as the grounds of the mansion where she’s living, then sees one of her guests give the fascist salute and slips away, disgusted.

There are limitations to this movie, notably the rather sappy piano-and-strings music by Paolo Vivaldi (probably no relation to Antonio biologically and certainly no relation creatively) that evoked memories of a million romances on Lifetime (Charles joked that if Lifetime had made this it would have been called The Perfect Communist), but it’s beautifully filmed (for once we get a movie set in the recent past in which the colors are bright and vivid and actually contain hues other than dirty brown and dull green!) and effectively acted — Stefania Rocca is just right for the part, beautiful and alluring but no longer young (she was 40 when she made the movie — actually five years older than the real Edda Ciano was when she was interned on Lipari) and Alessandro Preziosi has that smoldering sexiness that makes Christopher Meloni so appealing and he’s also convincingly butch, a far cry from the androgyny of the two male Italian actors who ever achieved international stardom, Rudolph Valentino in the 1920’s and Marcello Mastroianni in the 1960’s. It’s also intelligently, if a bit sentimentally, written, with a bittersweet but believable ending as well as a crisis of conscience for the hero when the local Communist party wants him to run for mayor of Lipari despite the pretty large skeleton he’s just put in his own closet. (The party boss alludes to “rumors” about him — and he fires back, “Which are true!”) Edda Ciano and the Communist is a film that doesn’t quite overcome the blatant plot contrivance it’s built on, but within those limitations it’s a quite beautiful movie that avoids the twin temptations (getting either too sentimental or too preachy) that would probably have wrecked an American filmmaker attempting a similar story.

Mar Nero (Film Kairòs, Rai Cinema, HiFilm, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film Charles and I saw last night was Mar Nero, literally “Black Sea,” an Italian/Romanian co-production (the version we saw, at the San Diego Italian Film Festival, was in Italian, but apparently immediately after making the Italian version director Federico Bondi, who also co-wrote the script with Cosimo Calomini and Ugo Chiti, did a dubbed version in Romanian) from 2008 co-produced by the Italian state broadcasting company RAI with Film Kairòs and Hi Film. (When I saw the last-named company I did a Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style joke: I leaned over to Charles and whispered, “Hi, film!,” and made a waving motion.) When I saw from its imdb.com page that it was about the relationship between a young woman — undocumented Romanian immigrant Angela (Doroteea Petre) — and the older, crotchety woman she’s hired to take care of, Gemma Pratesi (Iliara Occhini), as a man who’s made his living as a caregiver to a disabled man for over 20 years I thought watching this film would be a busman’s holiday.

Nonetheless, we went, and Mar Nero turned out to be an uneven but still interesting movie whose main problem is that the scenes between Gemma and Angela — showcasing Gemma’s initial distrust and petty meanness turning into trust and something resembling affection — are so much more powerful than the rest of the movie that the rest of the movie seems downright boring by comparison. At the beginning we see Angela making her way across the titular “black sea,” a slang term for the stretch of the Mediterranean between Italy and Romania (as Charles joked after we saw the film, the Italians seem to regard the Romanians much the way many Americans living in border regions like San Diego regard Mexicans — at one point one of the other characters even threatens to report Angela to the authorities as undocumented and have her deported!), where she’s getting away from a problematic relationship with Adrian (Vlad Ivanov), whom imdb.com lists as her husband but who seemed to me to be just her boyfriend. At one point she goes to a New Year’s party, one of her rare opportunities while in Italy to be around people her own age, and there are a couple of nice pop-rock songs being played there by a band blessedly no better than one would expect from a group playing a seedy gig like this. Mar Nero is one of those movies in which nothing much happens — the intent of Bondi and his collaborators was clearly to give us a sort of neo-neorealism, a slice-of-life movie that doesn’t really build to a big climax until the very end, when Angela goes back to Romania and finds Adrian living with another woman.

I liked it and found the scenes between the caregiver and her client rang true — though Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her is still the best movie I’ve seen about the peculiarly intimate relationship between a caregiver and the person they take care of (though in that case it was complicated by the fact that there were two caregivers and two patients, the caregivers were both male, the patients were both female, both women were comatose and one was her caregiver’s ex-lover while the other was the object of a crush from the caregiver), this one is quite good and moving. It’s just that when we get away from Angela’s relationship with Gemma and the marvelously depicted tension between them, the movie turns flat and pretty dull and the matter-of-fact directorial and scripting style becomes too matter of fact to move. Still, given that the history of U.S. movies these days — especially the mainstream blockbuster entertainments — is for more thrills, more spectacle and an acute disinterest, verging on active distaste, for character motivation or any real emotion, it’s hard to fault a movie that tries to depict the real feelings of real-seeming people and, at least in the interchanges between its two central characters, actually succeeds.

Love With a Stranger (Trafalgar/United Artists, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When Charles and I got home, however, we watched a movie that was even more surprisingly good, since we hadn’t had much of an expectation for it: it was just another archive.org download of the film Love From a Stranger, the 1937 version of a story called “Philomel Cottage” by Agatha Christie (a real surprise since it’s a psychological thriller rather than a whodunit, and is one of the few times in her writing career that Christie actually gave a damn about character development and real emotion instead of just creating stick-figure people and having them enact a murder mystery) and the play Frank Vosper adapted from it, though in the U.S. it was released as A Night of Terror (which rather gives the ending away!).

It was produced by a British company called Trafalgar, though several Americans were involved: super-agent Harry Edgington (who had represented both John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in the silent era and anticipated Lew Wasserman and Charles Feldman in using his stable of stars to move from agentry to production) was the producer, Rowland V. Lee was the director, Frances Marion the screenwriter and Ann Harding starred as Carol Howard, a woman in London with a boring job (at a foundation of some sort); a boring fiancé, Ronald Bruce (Bruce Seton); a small flat and only two amusements: buying lottery tickets and hanging out with her roommate, Kate Meadows (Binnie Hale), whom she genuinely likes even though a third woman, Kate’s crotchety Aunt Lou (Jean Cadell) is part of the deal. Things change for her when one of her lottery tickets actually wins her a prize of several thousand pounds, and when she advertises a sublet on her flat the ad attracts a fascinating young man named Gerald Lovell (Basil Rathbone, a South African-born British-trained actor but one who already had a following among U.S. film audiences), who claims to be a World War I veteran and a South American oil tycoon and says he wants to rent her little flat because he used to live in the neighborhood before he struck it rich and wants to relive those days. Instead of moving in, though, he follows Carol onto the ship that’s taking her to Paris (it was a French lottery so she has to go there to claim the prize) and eventually woos her and marries her.

They live high off the hog and eventually, once they return to the U.K., Gerald announces that she’s buying them a house in Kent but he needs money to complete the deal — and Carol, totally trusting her husband, signs two large legal documents that give him control over her entire fortune. Once they move there, Carol’s life becomes slowly discombobulated as she sees Gerald go into irrational rages and tell both her and the servants, gardener Hobson (Donald Calthrop) and his daughter, maid Emmy (Joan Hickson, who according to imdb.com returned to Christie’s work decades later as Miss Marple on a BBC-TV series), that under no circumstances are they to go into the cellar because he has his darkroom there (he’s an amateur photographer) and he also does scientific experiments (he’s claimed to make his living as a chemical engineer). It’s not that clear what he really does in the cellar, but eventually it turns out that both he and the local doctor, Gribble (Bryan Powley), own a book about famous murderers — only Gerald’s copy is missing the photo of one of the most famous ones of all, Fleming, who made it his habit of meeting and wooing women who’d suddenly come into money, marrying them, getting them to sign their fortunes over to him and then killing them.

Dr. Gribble brings over his copy of the book, but before Carol can see it Gerald rips out the photo of Fleming from that copy, too, and needless to say it turns out that Gerald is Fleming and Carol is his next would-be victim — though the other characters learn what’s going on in time that Carol’s life is saved, Fleming is arrested and Carol ends up back in London with her boring job and her boring boyfriend. Love With a Stranger wasn’t exactly fresh drama then any more than it is now, and Rathbone had played a similar part two years earlier in the 1935 MGM film Kind Lady (with Aline MacMahon as his “mark”), only in that case he wasn’t romancing her (just taking advantage of her kind heart and interest in helping out the downtrodden) and he was a suave but sane swindler whose interest in Ms. MacMahon was in the 10 valuable paintings she had on the walls of her home. In Love With a Stranger Rathbone’s character is certifiably crazy, and his descent from Continental charmer to out-and-out madman is a chilling and vividly thought-out piece of acting. But what’s most interesting about Love With a Stranger is not the movies that inspired it but the ones with similar plotlines that came later, including Gaslight and Notorious. 

One advantage of those later films was that the damsel in distress was played by Ingrid Bergman, a far more subtle and sensitive actress than Ann Harding, who usually walked through her parts so impassively she sometimes comes across as an unfunny Buster Keaton in drag. In this movie at least Rowland V. Lee gets her to smile a couple of times in the opening reel, and as if to make up for her relative impassivity in the rest of the movie she goes into a spasm of flaring, scenery-chewing overacting in the scene in which she finally has to deal with the revelation that her husband is a serial killer. But despite Harding’s limitations, Love With a Stranger is a fine film, and it benefits from a quite advanced musical score by the young Benjamin Britten — much more dissonant than the norm for an American film at the time, though it suffers from the relative reticence of British studios in using music (the scored scenes are mostly dialogue-less montages and there’s surprisingly little underscoring of dialogue for 1937); with someone as skilled as Britten (even that early) composing the score, we’d certainly want to hear more of it!

Bloodlust! (Cinegrafik/Crown International, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I got home in time to watch a movie: a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a film called Bloodlust!, a 1961 ripoff of The Most Dangerous Game that follows the formula of Richard Connell’s famous 1924 short story and the three films (at least!) previously made of it, and casts Robert Reed, a deeply closeted Gay actor mostly known for his TV work, most famously the male lead on the sitcom The Brady Bunch, in the Joel McCrea role of the leader (more or less) of a group of tourists stranded on an island owned by a mad hunter (Wilton Graff, whose performance might have been better if he hadn’t been trying so hard to channel Vincent Price) who shoots down human beings, “hunts” them, kills them and then stuffs them for his “trophy room.” Basically it’s two stupid guys, Johnny Randall (Reed) and Dean Gerrard (Walter Brooke), and two stupid girls, Betty Scott (June Kenney) and Jeanne Perry (Joan Lora), being chased around the island by the mad hunter, whose name in the credits list is spelled “Dr. Albert Balleau” but the last name is pronounced “Bellow” by all the actors.

A story that is powerful and suspenseful in Connell’s story and the first film version (1932, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack from a script by Ruth Rose just before they and two of their cast members, Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray, went on to do King Kong) here just drags unmercifully and goes nowhere mighty slowly — though not slowly enough (imdb.com lists the running time as 68 minutes) that the MST3K crew didn’t have time to do a short film before it called A Visit to the Dairy Farm, produced by one of America’s milk associations and actually more intrinsically entertaining than the feature. The best part of the show was an MST3K interjection that had nothing to do with the movie: it featured Dr. Clayton Forrester having his mother over — and having her (played by Mary Jo Pehl, who took over the villainess role from her on-screen “son” in the latter stages of the show) fawn over his sidekick “TV Frank” (Frank Conniff), much to Dr. Forrester’s predictable irritation. That was a good deal more fun than they were able to have with this dreary movie, which like a lot of the other MST3K “targets” seems to have expressed its rottenness mostly as boredom. At least they didn’t cast Robert Reed as the mad hunter, as I’d feared — though that blatant an example of undercasting might actually have made the movie more fun!