Alfred Hitchcock: Master of Suspense (Legend Films, 1995)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was a 1995 made-for-video documentary called Alfred Hitchcock: Master of Suspense, produced by Richard Chechilo with “creative direction” by Lindsay Leucht and so obscure a production it isn’t listed on imdb.com. It suffered from an ultra-low production budget that didn’t allow its makers to do any interviews with people who’d worked with Hitchcock and also didn’t allow them to pay royalties to use clips from Hitchcock’s films — though they solved the latter problem by using clips from the movies Hitchcock made in England in the 1920’s and 1930’s (virtually all of which are in the public domain by now) and representing his subsequent productions by the original trailers. Movie studios didn’t bother to copyright trailers — indeed they wanted them to be shown as widely as possible — and thus Chechilo and Leucht were able to put together an inadvertently interesting mix that offered a lot of insights into Hitchcock’s public image by reviewing how his films were sold to audiences over the years. Hitchcock eventually became one of the few directors in cinema history whose name could attract audiences to a new film — along with D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and, at the peak of his career, Frank Capra — and it’s interesting how his name became more prominent over the years as it essentially became a “brand,” promising people a certain sort of entertainment: a taut, exciting thriller, carefully crafted for suspense and leavened with bits of black humor.

The film also included some quite odd clips that slipped through the copyright regime, including alternate introductions for Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV episodes, clips from promotional movies shot for CBS and NBC (the show started on CBS, moved to NBC and then went back, and there’s a quite funny sequence here set in what Hitchcock grandly tells us is a “dead-letter office” that heralded the show’s return to CBS and allowed Hitchcock to plug the other programs the network was showing on the same night as his) and a bit of a 1954 awards show in which Red Skelton gives Hitchcock an award for directing Rear Window and said he’d always wanted to work with Hitchcock because he wanted to do a “serious” movie for a change — to which Hitchcock drolly replied that that’s what he thought Skelton had been doing all along. The Hitchcock persona as we know it was basically the one crafted for his TV show by writer James Allardyce, who wrote the famous introductions and delighted in placing Hitchcock in preposterous situations, including one in which he was dressed in a Beatles wig and spotted behind a drum set, and one included here — shot for a re-release of the Hitchcock Presents shows for daytime viewing, aimed at an audience he referred to as “women — and a few men who are malingering,” in which he’s shown behind an ironing board. The show also includes the incredibly droll trailers Hitchcock shot for his films Psycho and The Birds, in which he drones on and on about the motel set in Psycho and humanity’s ongoing relationship with its feathered friends in The Birds (at the end of the trailer for The Birds he’s shown about to eat a roast chicken but thinks better of it because it wouldn’t be appropriate), quite different from the all-out excitement-fests conventional trailers for those movies would have been then or now.

The show didn’t delve into the darker parts of the Hitchcock personality — his penchant for playing practical jokes on his actors (in The 39 Steps Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll spend a good deal of the film handcuffed to each other, so during rehearsals he did it to them for real and was especially curious about how they handled it when they needed to use the bathroom), his infamous statement that “actors are cattle” (in a 1970’s TV interview with Richard Schickel Hitchcock said, “I did not say actors were cattle — I merely said they should be treated as cattle,” which sounded to me more insulting than the misquote!), his treatment of ‘Tippi’ Hedren (the single quotes around her first name were Hitchcock’s idea to make it more distinctive) on the set of The Birds and Marnie — and it also didn’t really attempt any analysis of the films. It gave rather short shrift to some of my favorite Hitchcock movies, including the awesome Rich and Strange from 1931 (O.K., it was a box-office flop on its first release — guess what, so was Vertigo!) and I Confess from 1953 (a wrenching tale of confession and guilt in which the protagonist, played by Montgomery Clift, is a Roman Catholic priest falsely accused of a murder; the gimmick is that the real killer confessed to it but, bound by the absolute confidentiality of the confessional, Clift’s character can’t reveal that fact even to save himself from being executed for the crime — I’ve long thought this would be one Hitchcock movie that would be a good candidate for a modern remake, especially if the former lover of the priest character — who was being blackmailed over the affair she had with him before he took his vows — were changed from a woman to a man), and it quoted Hitchcock’s famous comment about his two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much that “the first was made by a talented amateur and the second by a professional” (I’ve always liked the first one considerably better!) — but it still remained an interesting tribute to one of the greatest filmmakers of all time and a man whose mix of suspense, romance and dark wit remains unique despite all the more recent directors who’ve tried to imitate it.

Stalked at 17 (Shadowland/Lifetime, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Stalked at 17, an odd entry in their ongoing series of “_____ at 17” (or sometimes even earlier, as in Mom at 16) broadcasts and a pretty typical Christine Conradt script even though this time she’s only credited with the screenplay and another woman writer, Kathleen Mattison, gets credit for the “original” story (quotes definitely intended and appropriate!). Well directed by frequent Conradt collaborator Doug Campbell and on the whole decently acted, the film tells the story of Angela Curson (Taylor Spreitler, a former regular on Days of Our Lives who’s done some TV, including two episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and a current run on a five-year-old series called Melissa and Joey, and just finished making a movie called Girl on the Edge which, ironically, was also a working title for Stalked at 17), a 16-year-old high-school senior who, being a put-upon Lifetime teen heroine, of course comes from a dysfunctional family. Her dad Mark (Brian Jeffrey Crouse) is a real-estate salesman on the downgrade who’s just had part of his territory reassigned to someone else (one suspects he’s on the first step of the slide downhill of the characters in Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross) and whose income has taken a major financial hit just when he’s worrying about how he’s going to pay to send Angela to college. Her mom Karen (Amy Pietz) has been a stay-at-home housewife most of Angela’s life (and it seems hard to believe that these two stocky dark-haired people could produce skinny blonde Angela, but then the non-resemblance between people the script tells us are biological relatives is an old, old problem in movies) but is looking for waitressing work to bolster the family’s income.

Angela and her confidante, African-American fellow student Tanaya (Shavon Kirksey) — yes, this is yet another Lifetime movie in which a Black character is assigned the voice-of-reason role — go to a party at which Angela is cruised and successfully seduced by 21-year-old college student Chad Bruning (Chuck Hittinger). The inevitable (in movies, anyway) pregnancy at a single contact duly occurs — as I’ve noted here before, while it’s possible for a human female to get pregnant from her first unprotected sexual contact with a human male, human reproduction doesn’t routinely work that way in real life, though it does in the movies! — though this time around there’s no debate about what to “do” about the impending child. Chad is absolutely insistent that he’s going to marry Angela, figure out some way to support her and their newborn, and own up to his parental responsibilities. The problem with that is that Chad, despite his surface nice-guy demeanor, is a dysfunctional basket case with some monumental family problems of his own. He’s being raised by an adoptive mother, Lauren Bruning (Linda Purl), who’s a member of the City Council where this film takes place (the city is unnamed but it’s visibly L.A.) and also the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, and she’s used the clout of both those positions to spoil Chad rotten and shield him from having to take responsibility for his actions. Chad tells Angela (and us) that his mom is dead, but she really isn’t; she’s Kristy (Katrina Norman), who is about to be released on parole after serving 16 years for armed robbery. She was Lauren’s housemaid and, along with some friends (presumably including Chad’s biological dad), started robbing convenience stores to get money to fund her heroin addiction — only while in prison she’s cleaned up and held down an in-prison job, and is now applying for parole.

Chad insists on taking over Angela’s life, going ballistic in an (East) Indian restaurant after she’s served a piece of undercooked chicken and finally getting himself arrested — and Lauren has had enough and leaves him in jail instead of bailing him out. When Mark Curson threatens Chad with prosecution for statutory rape of his daughter, Chad responds by making a series of harassing phone calls at Mark’s workplace (Mark has Chad’s cell number blocked and Chad goes out to a pay phone — where does he find one? — to continue his harassment), and when the Curson parents get a restraining order against Chad he responds by breaking into their home, kidnapping Angela and stealing the baby — who by this time has been born and is a boy named Josh whom Angela, her parents and a guy named Trent (Sidney Franklin) who appears to be her new (and considerably more stable) boyfriend are working together to raise. The publicity on this movie said Chad “promises to kill his girlfriend when she threatens to end the relationship and take their baby,” but that’s not really apparent in Conradt’s script — though there’s the implicit threat that if Angela does anything to cross Chad he will totally lose it and end up killing her. On the run with Chad, Chad’s mom (whom I actually felt sorry for because her involvement in Chad’s crime will result in the revocation of her parole and her return to prison) and baby Josh, Angela tricks Chad into letting her stop at a convenience store to buy ointment for the baby. She hides out in the bathroom (aw, c’mon; what convenience store in the U.S. in 2012 still had a restroom they’d let customers use?) and scrawls out a message in lipstick on the stall door, and opportunely the next woman who needs the facility, who’s a middle-aged African-American (once again a Black character is the deus ex machina!), reads the note and alerts the proprietor, who confronts Chad and shoots him with a gun he keeps in his cash register to deal with potential robbers. (The National Rifle Association must have loved this movie; it’s one in which a bad guy with a gun is indeed brought down by a good guy with a gun.) Chad, laying bleeding on the convenience store floor, offers Angela his gun and tells her to shoot the proprietor, but she ignores him and waits for the police to arrive — and, unusually for a Christine Conradt villain, Chad is actually taken alive instead of dead.

Stalked at 17 is a pretty ordinary Lifetime movie, and the title is a bit deceptive in that Chad’s attempts to stay in touch with Angela don’t become what we ordinarily think of as stalking until about halfway through the movie (usually the term “stalking” in this context means a man following a woman and harassing her out of the belief that they have, or should have, a relationship but they really don’t; Chad’s behavior may be way out of line but he and Angela did have sex and conceive a child together, so there’s a real-world connection between them!), but like a lot of other Lifetime movies in this genre it’s redeemed, at least partially, by a terrific performance by the actor playing the bad guy. Chad Hittinger would seem to have everything required for major stardom (which is why it seems odd that according to imdb.com his other credits are in tacky-sounding things like American Reunion, Boogeyman 3 and Sharknado); he’s tall, blond and drop-dead gorgeous, and confronted with a script that requires him to do a slow, inexorable descent from surface charm to edginess to out-and-out madness, he nails it at every step of the way. It would have been nice to see a soft-core porn scene between him and Taylor Spreitler, but since she was supposed to be playing 16 (even though she was actually 19 when the film was shot) that was probably ruled out by the censors. One imdb.com reviewer called Spreitler the weak link in the cast, and it’s true she could have done more to delineate the shock the character would have felt at Chad’s first outbursts and the sheer terror she’d have been in as his kidnapping victim, but she’s acceptable and personable and even her relative woodenness (especially by comparison with the full-blooded performance of her co-star!) works in a way to project the character’s naïveté. The two older women in Chad’s life, Linda Purl as his adoptive mother and Katrina Norman as his real one, also turn in indelible performances that help raise this movie at least somewhat above the Lifetime norm.

Billy Joel: George and Ira Gershwin Prize, Library of Congress (PBS-TV, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The show was a tribute to Billy Joel from Washington, D.C. on the occasion of him winning the George and Ira Gershwin Prize for popular songwriting, which had been given five times previously: in 2007 to Paul Simon, in 2009 to Stevie Wonder, in 2010 to Paul McCartney, in 2012 to Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and in 2013 to Carole King. (In my opinion, the next one should absolutely go to Elvis Costello, who actually participated as an artist in the tribute concert for McCartney — either him or the most obvious American missing from that list, Bob Dylan!) Billy Joel’s win was announced on July 22, 2014, and if anything what the special proved was how strong the “legs” of Joel’s songs are, how well they respond to other musicians’ approaches instead of just being personal vehicles for their composer. It also helped that the jawboning from the announcers was kept to a minimum and the show emphasized the music — even the MC, Kevin Spacey, had proven himself a capable singer in his Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea, and at the end of the concert he joined Joel and the rest of the participants playing the harmonica part on Joel’s star-making song, Piano Man. The mini-bio of Joel mentioned that his first album, Cold Spring Harbor, made in 1971, had flopped — though it didn’t note that the reason was it was made for Ampex, a company that mostly made tape recorders and pre-recorded tapes, and they took a brief flyer into the record business in the early 1970’s that ended just after Joel’s album was released. (Since then Columbia, the label he’s been on the entire rest of his career, bought the master and reissued it on CD.) The show opened with a dance troupe choreographed by Twyla Tharp doing a hot (in more senses than one) number to Joel’s recordings of “Middle of the Night” and “Keeping the Faith,” and the sight of all those muscular male dancers in skin-tight costumes was fun for non-musical reasons. (There were women in the dance troupe, too, but they were easy to overlook.) Then Boyz II Men came out for a lovely a cappella version of  “The Longest Time” which was one of the highlights of the show — a neo-doo-wop group doing Joel’s tribute to doo-wop — followed by Lee Ann Rimes, the Joan Sutherland of pop, mush-mouthing her way through “You’ll Always Be a Part of Me.” (I like her voice, but will someone please get her some diction lessons?)

Then an artist whose name I heard as “Gavin McGraw” came out and did one of my favorite Joel songs, “It’s Still Rock ’n’ Roll to Me” (yes, he wrote it somewhat opportunistically to prove he was still “relevant” in the early 1980’s era of punk and “new wave,” and a punk band inevitably did a parody called “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me,” but it’s still a great song and it is all just rock ’n’ roll to me!), and the show cut to a film clip of Joel himself performing “Only the Good Die Young” in Leningrad during his 1987 tour of the Soviet Union. (Remember Leningrad? Remember the Soviet Union?) Apparently Joel was the first Western artist allowed to come into the U.S.S.R. and do a full-out rock ’n’ roll show — the clip shows him (his hair cut relatively short but still there) jumping around on stage — Elton John and others had been allowed in earlier but they’d been told they could only sit on stage and play (and Elton was allowed to bring only Nigel Olsson accompanying him on congas, not his full band). The clip also reminded us of Joel’s long-time drummer Liberty DeVitto (I love his name and I also love his kick-ass playing!), and how his music suffered (especially on the fast songs) when he and Joel parted company. Then Josh Groban came out and did a perfectly serviceable version of “She’s Always a Woman,” after which there was a clip of Joel doing “The Star-Spangled Banner” from the final concert at Shea Stadium in 2008. (He still had a little hair left; he’s now completely bald, and this gives him a rather severe mien it’s hard to reconcile with the bushy long hair he had during his debut.) After that Michael Feinstein came out and played, not anything by Billy Joel, but a brief bit of “Rhapsody in Blue” to honor the people (one of them, anyway) the award Joel was getting was named for. After some more speechmaking the stage was taken over by some of the most powerful performers all night, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks singing an impassioned version of “She’s Got a Way”; John Mellencamp recasting “Allentown” as if Bob Dylan had written it (it worked, but somehow I like Joel’s own version better — particularly the jarring contrast of a political lyric and Joel’s usual showbizzy New York style); and (after a spoken tribute by Paul McCartney, an excerpt from the 2008 Shea concert of Joel and McCartney performing a bit of “I Saw Her Standing There,” and another bit of the Twyla Tharp dancers doing “Shameless”) Tony Bennett belting his heart out on “New York State of Mind” (even though the city he most famously lost his heart to is his native one, San Francisco) and making me wonder how he’s been able to keep his voice together so long with only the hint of raggedness associated with age. (His voice certainly has held up better than Frank Sinatra’s did!)

Fortunately, the producers of this show cut the “tribute” part at this point — no one could have followed Tony Bennett singing a Billy Joel song except Joel himself doing so, and though his current (Black, dreadlocked) drummer doesn’t have Liberty DeVitto’s power Joel nonetheless uncorked scorching versions of four of his most intense songs: “Anthony’s Song (Movin’ Out,” “Vienna Waits for You,” “Lights Out on Broadway” (the one he played on the benefit for Hurricane Sandy relief, which sounded uncannily like he’d written it for the occasion even though he hadn’t) and “You May Be Right (I May Be Crazy).” During his set he briefly played the intro to “Just the Way You Are” — one of those songs, like Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” that became so ubiquitous in its day you grew sick of it (well, I did, anyway) and then heard it again years later and thought, “Wow, that really was a good song.” Joel was making the point that the sheet music printed his intro incorrectly and he gets tired showing up anywhere there’s a singer-pianist performing, said singer-pianist spotting him in the audience and playing “Just the Way You Are” in his honor and faithfully reproducing the wrong intro. “But I’m not going to play that song,” Joel said after his demonstration. The finale brought everyone back on stage for “Piano Man,” another song that’s become so ubiquitous it’s acquired a patina of respectability when in fact it’s a pretty radical piece of material whose whole theme is the alienation of a professional musician who’s sick and tired of playing cocktail-lounge gigs at which no one is listening to him!

Chinatown After Dark (Ralph M. Like Productions, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Chinatown After Dark, a 1931 production from Ralph M. Like’s studio, and unusually good for a Like production even though it’s not an especially great film — though it had the potential to be a good deal better than it was. It was directed by Stuart Paton, whose best-known credit was probably the 1916 silent version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Universal (and it’s a measure of how difficult this story was to film in an era of primitive effects work that, though it was safely in the public domain, no one went near it again until Walt Disney took it on in 1954) and whom S. J. Perelman, reviewing that film in the early 1950’s, described as an unwitting surrealist: “I daresay that if Stuart Paton … were functioning today (i.e., 1952), the votaries of the Surrealist film who sibilate around the Little Carnegie and the Fifth Avenue Playhouse would be weaving garlands for his hair. That man could make a cryptogram out of Mother Goose.” Chinatown After Dark actually begins in China — in Shanghai, which at least in the Western imagination was China’s most corrupt city (an image exploited in John Colton’s play The Shanghai Gesture and Josef von Sternberg’s film Shanghai Express — later Sternberg would film The Shanghai Gesture, too) — and establishes the film’s MacGuffin, a ceremonial dagger belonging to the family of Li Fong (Edmund Breese), who some years earlier emigrated to the U.S. with his white ward, Lotus (Barbara Kent), intending to raise her and get her a Western education and then return her to China to take over the destinies of the Li Fong family — at least I think that’s what we were supposed to glean from Betty Burbridge’s script and Paton’s cryptogram-out-of-Mother-Goose direction of it. He hired Ralph Bonner (Frank Mayo) to get the dagger out of China and to him in the U.S., but both in Shanghai and in San Francisco (once his ship arrives there) he’s set upon by various baddies after the dagger. The mastermind of the plot to steal it is Madame Ying Sin (Carmel Myers, top-billed), who operates out of a tea house (and, it’s darkly hinted, an opium den) in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and though Bonner is killed his brother Jim (Rex Lease, second-billed — both he and Myers were silent-era “B”-listers whose careers, such as they had been, dwindled in the early days of sound) takes over, recovers the stolen dagger and the black pearl concealed in its handle, and ends up with Lotus.

Way too much footage is taken up by a “comic” police detective, Dooley, played by Billy Gilbert — who gets all too many opportunities to showcase his famous sneeze and who, of course, thinks Jim Bonner killed both Li Feng and his own brother and is determined to nail him. Gilbert did some great movies, but they were in the company of Laurel and Hardy (most famously the brilliant 1932 short The Music Box), Nelson Eddy and Eleanor Powell (Rosalie, 1937) and Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday, 1940, in which Gilbert’s one scene as the honest doofus who brings down a corrupt political machine by innocently refusing to be bribed is more delightful and entertaining than all his work here). Where Chinatown After Dark scores is its visual atmosphere; all too many early-1930’s indies were shot in plain, evenly lit grey tones even when they could have benefited from the chiaroscuro look then called “German style” and later film noir. On this one, cinematographer Jules Cronjager kicked out the jams and shot virtually the whole film in half-lights and shadows, thereby disguising how cheap the sets were as well as creating the appropriate atmosphere for a tale of intrigue and deception, though given the usual poor quality of an archive.org download that also had the result of making the film very difficult to watch — at times the combination of Cronjager’s arty lighting and the deterioration through the passage of years made the movie so dark it was often almost impossible to tell what was going on. Other than that, the film was pretty typical indie — the characters generally delivered their lines in a stilted style more common in 1929 than 1931, there was virtually no background music (though given the tacky quality of rent-a-scores available to cheapie producers like Ralph M. Like that might not have been altogether a bad thing), and the acting — aside from Myers, who was delivering the stereotypical glacial performance of a white actress playing a “bad” Asian woman but at least was doing that schtick well — was at best mediocre and at worst (Billy Gilbert) offensively bad. Still, Chinatown After Dark is an oddly engaging movie, probably because it’s trying for Sternbergian atmospherics — one can readily imagine the basic story being used as a Sternberg vehicle for Anna May Wong, who would have totally out-acted Carmel Myers in the bad-girl lead but was also sick to death of those parts! — and though it doesn’t really work it’s still an intriguing effort that ventures more than most indies of its period.

Captain Swagger (Pathé, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Captain Swagger, a Pathé production from 1928 and a vehicle for Rod La Rocque (a sporadically interesting actor whose best film was probably his performance as the “bad” brother in Cecil B. DeMille’s silent version of The Ten Commandments in 1923, opposite Richard Dix as the “good” brother) whose first reel is probably its best. It takes place in World War I, and La Rocque plays Captain Hugh Drummond (presumably an American flying with the Lafayette Escadrille since he has an Anglo name but his plane is a French Spad), who shoots down German ace Von Stahl (Ullricht Haupt) but allows him to live if Von Stahl will allow him to escape and fly his own plane back to the French lines. Directed by Edward H. Griffith — a director with a spotty record but one who made some quite compelling films (notably Next Time We Love, a Universal film from 1936 that was the first of four teamings of Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart — Captain Swagger introduces the La Rocque character while he’s tumbling out of a car, dead drunk, accompanied by a woman he’s obviously picked up for the evening. Alas, after the war sequence the film flashes forward 10 years to the 1928 present, and Drummond is a Broadway playboy who’s run through his fortune and is about to be thrown out of his suite at the Plaza Apartments. To the shock of his comic-relief butler/sidekick Jean (Victor Potel) — apparently we were supposed to believe he’d brought this guy back from the war as a sort of human souvenir — Drummond announces that he’s going to get his fortune back by using a “Chicago-style” technique, meaning he’s going to become a modern-day highwayman and hold up passing cars.

The first passing car he holds up — in a preposterous (even by 1928 standards!) get-up of top hat, tails and a white mask — is occupied by unemployed dancer Sue Arnold (Sue Carol, who later quit acting and became an agent; she’s best known for both discovering and marrying Alan Ladd) and her sugar daddy de jour, Phil Poole (Richard Tucker). Phil is driving their car (a Rolls-Royce with right-hand drive, which in itself establishes him as a snooty no-goodnick) in a reckless fashion that indicates he’s drunk, and when the car finally skids to a stop Phil puts some untoward moves on Our Heroine that lead her to ask the bandit to rescue her. Naturally, he does so, taking her back to his apartment — she complains that she owes one month on his own place and is about to be thrown out onto the streets, and he shows her the letter from his landlord, topping her by saying he owes five months — and offering to get her a job dancing at the Viennese Club. The club’s manager (Maurice Black) notes how wretchedly untalented they are but figures they’ll go over big as camp — especially since Drummond is a well-known enough celebrity (one of those people who’s famous just for being famous, sort of like a male version of the Kardashians) people will flock to the club just to see him make an ass of himself. After his opening number (quite impressively produced for a silent film, and likely shot to an especially composed score since, though we weren’t watching it that way, Captain Swagger originally came out with a synchronized Photophone music-and-effects soundtrack) Drummond jokes to Sue about how easy it would be for him to rob the nightclub — and just then a gang of real crooks shows up and actually does rob the nightclub, and the gang turns out to be led by Drummond’s old wartime acquaintance/enemy Von Stahl. Drummond is torn between his normal honesty, his desire to protect Sue’s career, and his owing a favor to Von Stahl; in the end, of course, the crooks are captured and Drummond and Sue are paired to survive God knows how.

Captain Swagger is a mediocre movie with elements of a good movie trying to get out; it occurred to me that it was an attempt to do a screwball comedy about six years too early, and I couldn’t help but wish there’d been a talkie remake in the mid-1930’s with Barbara Stanwyck and Cary Grant — screwball was a genre that democratized movie comedy (it meant that actors with reputations for dramatic roles could let their hair down and make comedies that could be cast with anyone on the studio’s contract list and didn’t require specialists like Chaplin, Keaton, Arbuckle, Langdon or Lloyd) but so much of its humor was driven by wisecracks it really required sound, especially since it was all those Broadway writers like Herman and Joseph Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, George S. Kaufman, S. J. Perelman, Jo Swerling, Robert Riskin and the like who had come out to Hollywood in the wake of sound that supplied the wisecracks. Still, it was a fun if rather inconsequential movie, and it was rather oddly presented by archive.org in a print that included a score played on both piano and organ (presumably the original Photophone soundtrack is long since lost), and was shown in a continuous blue tint rather than either straight black-and-white or the variegated tints and tones that quite a few silent films were released in to make up for the lack of color. Charles and I had seen a few films from the 1950’s on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in overall blue tints (you could tell it was the source for the movie rather than a glitch in the program itself because the interstital sequences with the MST3K cast looked normal) and his private-label print of the 1932 film Woman Wanted come with an overall green cast that made me wonder if the original had been shot in two-strip Technicolor and what we had left was a badly faded print with pretty much just the green dyes intact (not true), but this is the first time we’ve seen it in a straightforward presentation of a film that wasn’t in the process of being ridiculed.

Poirot: “Curtain: Poirot”s Last Case” (ITV/PBS-TV, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched another of KPBS’s telecasts of the British TV series Poirot, this one based on Agatha Christie’s book Curtain — which I had been under the impression she actually wrote during the 1950’s but kept from publication until after her death. She wrote this book, in which Poirot would die — and another, Sleeping Murder, that killed off her other big series character, Miss Marple — with instructions that they be published after her own death to supply definitive endings to both series and prevent her publisher from hiring other writers to continue producing books with those characters. It wasn’t a great story but it was worlds better than the last Poirot episode PBS showed, “The Labors of Hercules,” mainly because it had fewer and more interesting characters and some actually sort-of developed relationships between them. Poirot shows up in a wheelchair kvetching about the heart condition that has disabled him — in that regard, watching this was a busman’s holiday for me! — in the company of his friend Captain Hastings (Hugh Fraser), who’s essentially Watson to Poirot’s Holmes (though Holmes never insulted Watson’s intelligence the way Poirot does to Hastings throughout this story). The action takes place at Styles Manor, famously the setting of Christie’s first Poirot story (and the book whose blockbuster success established her reputation), The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and it involves Hastings’ concern that his daughter Judith (Alice Orr-Ewing) is having an affair with a scapegrace officer, Major Allerton (Matthew McNulty). Only she’s really dating a married medical researcher, Dr. Franklin (Shaun Dingwall), with whom she hopes to go to Africa. Naturally both she and Franklin are suspected when Franklin’s wife Barbara (Anna Madeley) turns up dead from poison. (The PBS biography of Christie I saw on their series Extraordinary Women mentions that she had served in World War I as an Army nurse, and traced her interest in poison as a murder method to the knowledge of pharmacology she gained in that job.)

Later a hanger-on, birdwatcher Stephen Norton (Aidan McArdle), approaches Poirot and said he saw something relevant to the murder — only before he can tell anyone he’s found dead in his room from a gunshot wound to the forehead. Poirot himself dies two-thirds of the way through the episode, but he hangs around long enough to explain the crime after his own death via a letter he wrote Hastings giving the solution (and giving writer Kevin Elyot and director Hettie MacDonald the chance to show the actor playing Poirot, David Suchet, in flashbacks): Norton was really responsible for the crimes since, under the lash of a domineering and emotionally frigid mother, he’d developed an addiction for setting up scenes in which he would goad other people to commit murder (including Hastings, whom he nearly convinced to murder Allerton because of the supposed affair he was having with Hastings’ daughter) and get a vicarious thrill when the murders happened. It also turns out that Barbara Franklin was involved in a murder plot of her own; she wanted to dispatch her husband so she could marry the wealthy William Boyd Carrington (Philip Glenister), and to that end she spiked his coffee with poison, only Hastings accidentally reversed the table the cups were on so she got the poisoned one. Poirot deduced Norton’s role in the whole affair, and having faked his disability (though his life-threatening heart disease was real), he killed Norton himself and faked it to look like suicide — a self-plagiarism from Christie’s And Then There Were None (in which a judge, frustrated throughout his career by the people who committed murder in ways the laws could not touch, assembled 10 people on an otherwise deserted island and knocked them off one by one — Christie even cribbed the detail of the forehead wound, “the mark of Cain,” from her previous book). “Curtain” is more interesting than the general run of Poirot stories, mainly because Norton proves to be an unusually compelling character for a Christie villain — she had a real gift for writing psychos and I find myself wishing she’d have written more psychological thrillers (including “Philomel Cottage,” filmed hauntingly in 1937 as Love from a Stranger with Basil Rathbone as a serial killer we know is guilty almost from the get-go and the suspense, as in a Hitchcock movie, is over what’s going to happen when the other characters figure it out) and fewer dreary whodunits.

Divergent (Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate, Red Wagon, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Divergent, a 2014 release from Summit Entertainment (identified with its own logo but also as “A Lionsgate Company”) and Red Wagon Entertainment based on the 2011 novel by Veronica Roth. It’s not surprising that Summit was interested in this story property because they’d already had mega-successes with the sequences of films based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games cycle, and Divergent promised more of the same: like The Hunger Games, it’s a cycle of three books set in a dystopian future. The story opens 100 years after a series of devastating wars laid waste to the U.S., and in order to prevent future conflicts, the rulers of the unnamed society (which is centered around what is now Chicago — Roth is a Chicago resident and filled the book with familiar geography, though she was ambiguous about just how far beyond Chicago’s current boundaries her society extends) divided its population into five Factions. The idea is that there were five different ideas about what had caused the conflicts and each of the Factions was formed to control the particular bad side of human nature its founders believed was at fault. As Roth explains it herself in a speech on page 42 of the novel, given by Marcus (the society’s overall leader), “Those who blamed aggression formed Amity. … Those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite. … Those who blamed duplicity created Candor. … Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation. … And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless.” (When we read the book, both Charles and I were mildly annoyed that Roth didn’t make the names of the Factions all the same part of speech; instead we have three abstract nouns and two adjectives.) I’m not sure whether Roth intended this (the book comes with a long series of afterwords including an “interview” with Roth — I suspect she wrote both the questions and the answers — along with quotations from previous works of literature that inspired her and an aptitude test that is part of the book’s reality in terms of how people are assigned to the various Factions) but the Factions seem inspired a great deal by the traditional caste system of India — though theoretically the Factions are equal and it’s only the so-called “Factionless,” the people who fail the initiation rituals of the various Factions and thereby wash out of the system, that are the society’s underclass, very much like the Indian dalits (“untouchables”).

The entire idea that a society could willfully salami-slice the human personality so its members are allowed to express one and only one aspect of it is pretty preposterous, so it’s not surprising that the book’s heroine, Beatrice “Tris” Prior (Shailene Woodley), turns out to be a so-called “Divergent,” a person who has qualities of more than one faction and therefore resists being made to fit into just one. Beatrice is the daughter of Andrew (Tony Goldwyn) and Natalie (Ashley Judd); Andrew is a member of the Council that runs the whole place and which is chaired by Marcus (Ray Stevenson), all of whom are members of the Abnegation faction because the founders decided that the only people who could be trusted to govern were the selfless whose whole mission in life was relentlessly to put the interests of others ahead of their own. Nonetheless, both Beatrice and her older brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) pick other factions when they have the once-in-a-lifetime chance to do so: at the Choosing Ceremony, which is both an initiation into adulthood and an opportunity for the young people either to sign on to their parents’ Faction (as 95 percent of them do) or transfer to something else. What makes it difficult is not only that they have to make a once-in-a-lifetime choice about their entire destiny when they’re just teenagers, but they’re not allowed to know the requirements of a different faction before they join, they’re not allowed to reconsider their choice and if they wash out of their Faction training, they’re going to end up Factionless, shut out of society and forced to scrounge whatever sort of living they can on the streets. (In Roth’s book the Factionless were allowed to do odd jobs; in the script by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor they seem to do nothing but wander around in scruffy black clothes and survive on whatever food they can pick up off the streets or what’s delivered to them by a charity run by Abnegation — though we never actually see the charity in action and the question of whether or not it even exists is a major plot point as the story develops.) Both Caleb and Beatrice quit Abnegation; Caleb goes with Erudite and Beatrice, as our spirited and plucky heroine in the Bella Swan/Katniss Everdeen mold, naturally picks Dauntless, the warrior class. (When I read the book, cognizant that it had been filmed and that when Roth was writing it she had probably been aiming for a movie sale because that’s where the big money in pop-fiction writing is these days, I thought, “Of course she picks Dauntless! That’s the only Faction whose training is going to be at all interesting cinematically!”)

In Dauntless Beatrice — or “Tris,” as she re-christened herself because her given name is way too Abnegatory for her new comrades — is subjected to the familiar rituals of military boot camp plus a few new ones out of Veronica Roth’s imagination, notably a series of drills done out of what looks like a dentist’s chair that involve the plebes being injected with a serum that gives them hallucinations that force them to confront their deepest fears. At first Beatrice is at the bottom of her class, mainly because as an Abnegation kid (a “Stiff,” as the others in Dauntless refer to her and Abnegation people in general) she’s never actually hit another person in anger and she’s immediately plunged into no-rules hand-to-hand fighting with her classmates, but her resourcefulness and willingness to work herself hard pushes her up the ranking. So does her Divergent status, which though she’s been carefully instructed not to reveal it to anyone because being Divergent is practically a capital crime gives her the ability to control the simulated fear scenarios and thus make it through the exercise faster than anyone else in her class. The story is basically the account of her training — governed by two people, a sadistic psycho named Eric (Jai Courtney) and a sympathetic character called “Four” (Theo James) to whom she’s drawn romantically, with a subplot involving Erudite leader Jeanine Matthews, who’s working on a plot to get rid of the Abnegation faction and install Erudites as the society’s leaders because she, like Plato, believes that the intellectuals should rule. To accomplish this she puts out propaganda that Abnegation’s leaders aren’t anywhere near as selfless as advertised, and the money they’re supposedly collecting to help the Factionless is actually lining the Abnegation leaders’ own pockets and giving them more consumer goods than everyone else. (In the book she actually puts out newspaper articles to this effect, but the film eschews any such retro technology as words on paper!) She also works out a special serum — here is where these comments are going to get into “spoiler” territory — by which she’s going to hijack the Dauntless troops to wage a genocidal war on the Abnegation Faction, thereby wiping out the existing leadership class so she and her fellow Erudites can replace them. In the end Tris and Four — who turns out not only to be Divergent himself but also a former Abnegation and, indeed, Tobias, son of overall leader Marcus (who denounced him as a scapegrace in the opening pages of the book) — manage to foil the plot by finding and destroying the computer program that’s running the simulation and making the Dauntless believe they’re merely fighting a simulation instead of waging an actual war, and a genocidal one at that.

As an allegory Divergent is hardly a patch on The Hunger Games, which though farther removed from the world in which we live is closer in terms of its social arrangements; the dystopia of The Hunger Games, in which a handful of elite people at the top extract surplus value from everyone else and exploit the masses relentlessly, is a logical extension of the increasing levels of economic and social inequality we see throughout the world today (and the ultimate ending of the cycle — the old order falls but the new one is just as vicious and oppressive, and Katniss and her partner Peeta end up literally growing their garden together, isolated from both their unwelcome celebrity as Hunger Games contestants and the roles they were impressed into both by the rebels and the authorities they were rebelling against — is a profound expression of the modern Zeitgeist among young people, if they think about politics at all, that the system sucks but any attempt to change it is futile at best and counterproductive at worst). As Charles pointed out, aside from mentioning that the Amity are the farmers (why?), Roth never explains how work gets done or whatever industrial production there is in her city-state happens; there are functioning cars, buses and trains but no explanation of how they are powered, and the trains seem to exist only so the Dauntless can show their pluck and courage by jumping on and off them while they are moving — we don’t see any signs of train stations or ordinary people moving either themselves or freight on them. Though the story is supposed to be set at least a century from now, the buildings and vehicles are those of our time; the cars are a bit dowdier and the skyscraper buildings are either in ruins or have been abandoned, but the Erudite have an elaborate computer network (which they’ve shared with the Dauntless but not, apparently, with the Abnegation even though the Abnegation are supposed to be running everything) and an incredible variety of mind-altering chemicals used in the Dauntless training and the final Erudite attempt to wipe out the entire Abnegation. At the same time there’s a parallel to The Hunger Games in that Divergent, too, is about an attempt to improve humanity that goes terribly awry — though in Divergent that’s happened in the backstory instead of during the cycle — and creates a new regime more oppressive than the one it replaced. Divergent the novel is compelling entertainment, and there’s a Rorshach-like aspect to the whole idea of the Factions — I don’t think anyone could read the novel without asking themselves which Faction they would be in if they lived in its universe (and Roth’s inclusion of a written questionnaire like those used by her characters to determine where everyone belongs just encourages her readers, or at the least the ones that get that far, to do precisely that!) — but it’s nowhere near as interesting as The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth is a talented writer but hardly at Suzanne Collins’ level in both dramatizing the conflicts in her world and creating thrilling action scenes.

Surprise — Divergent the movie, though working from inherently weaker material, struck me as a better piece of filmmaking than the two Hunger Games movies I’ve seen, despite a few annoying deviations from the novel (in the book there’s a formal Visiting Day in which Tris’s parents are allowed to visit her; in the film her mom has to sneak into Dauntless, and the film leaves out the key instruction Tris gets from her mom to ask her Erudite brother Caleb about the serum; also the film leaves out the romance between Will and Christine, two of Tris’s fellow Dauntless plebes, and therefore reduces the poignancy when Tris has to kill the mind-controlled Will in the final fight; also the scene in which Peter, one of the psycho plebes, stabs another one named Edward in the eyes, blinds him and sends him out of Dauntless because he was worried Edward was doing better in the training than he was, was shot but had to be removed from the film because that would have pushed it beyond PG-13 rating territory and stuck it with an R, cutting off a lot of its intended audience), mainly because director Neil Burger is simply a more talented filmmaker than the hacks who’ve done the Hunger Games movies (Gary Ross the first one, and Francis Lawrence the next two, Catching Fire and Mockingjay — Part 1). Throughout the film he shows off a flair for suspense evoking Hitchcock comparisons (literally in the scene in which, as part of one of her fear simulations, Tris is menaced by a flock of crows and Burger almost inevitably shoots the attack the way Hitchcock shot The Birds) and manages to juice up Roth’s story by making the action genuinely exciting. It also helps that, even though Roth wasn’t involved in scripting the movie (as Suzanne Collins has been in the Hunger Games films), it tracks the novel quite closely (the few arbitrary changes mentioned above notwithstanding) and has a satisfying enough ending it works as a self-contained movie whether Lionsgate and Red Wagon choose to produce the sequelae or not. According to the box-office numbers on imdb.com, Divergent cost an estimated $85 million to make, had a gross of $54,607,747 on the all-important opening weekend in March 2014, and a total gross as of July 4 of $150,832,203. Given the rule of thumb that a film has to earn twice its production cost before it turns a profit (the extra is the cost of advertising, promotion and distribution), these numbers suggest Divergent did well enough for Lionsgate but was not so sensationally successful as to merit continuing the cycle — though imdb.com lists the second film, Insurgent, as being in post-production and two films based on the third book, Allegiant (the business of splitting the last book in one of these cycles into two films began with the last Harry Potter novel and has continued with the final Hunger Games book, Mockingjay) have been “announced.”