by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. last night
Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called All My Husband’s Wives which, while nowhere near Their Killer Affair in quality, had its appeal even though it lost me
in a bewildering series of reversal upon reversal at the ending that made me
wonder if the credited screenwriter, James Phillips, had had uncredited help
from Michael Clayton and Duplicity writer-director Tony Gilroy. The director was
Caroline Labrèche (as you can guess from her French name, this was one of
Lifetime’s and production company Incendo Media’s Canadian productions) and,
though it begins with a murder, All My Husband’s Wives was really more of a comedy than anything else. It
starts with Alison Whitford (Erin Karpluk) sending off her husband Dominick
(Trevor Hayes) on what she thinks is an out-of-town business trip to Panama,
where he supposedly works for a platinum mining company. Only on his way to the
airport he’s struck by a speeding car and killed in a hit-and-run accident. At
least the police, led by detective Gabriel Strickland (Joris Jarsky), think it’s an accident — until a witness comes forward
and tells Strickland that the car sped up just before it struck Dominick,
therefore indicating it was a deliberate attack and he was murdered.
Investigating the case as a homicide, the police naturally suspect Alison — so
Alison starts her own investigation, not only to clear her name but to find out
who actually did kill Dominick. Only she’s
waylaid by a gun-toting woman named Marla Mitchell (Kate Corbett) who claims
that Dominick was her husband
— and they’d been married for five years whereas Alison had been married to him
only one year.
On realizing that their late husband was a bigamist, the two
women join forces in an uncertain alliance to get to the bottom of Dominick’s
murder and find out how he actually made his money, since an official of the
mining company for which he worked told Alison no one of that name was ever employed there. Ultimately the two women find keys
to a lavish apartment — considerably nicer than either of the places they lived with Dominick in — and they let themselves
in, only to be confronted by another wife, Cheryl Volberg (they all have different last names because
Dominick used a different identity for each marriage), who says she married
Dominick nine years before and therefore she’s his only legal wife and entitled
to all his estate. The movie
works best when the three women — sometimes friends, sometimes allies,
sometimes antagonists — are front and center on screen, and when they’re not
getting angry with each other and pulling guns on each other they’re quite
charming and Phillips’ writing and Labrèche’s direction achieve something of
the camp appeal of the Thin Man movies and other 1930’s films that combined screwball comedy and mystery
elements. One interesting irony is that Alison’s career is as a marriage and
family counselor, and she’s petrified that the information that she was in a
bigamous (strictly speaking a trigasmous) marriage will leak out to the press and kill her career — and
when it does leak she suspects Cheryl,
the bitchiest and most imperious of the three, but later finds out it was
really Marla. Writer Phillips drops us a big hint when Marla says she was
married before to a boy who knocked her up when they were in high school
together — only he got run over by a car
shortly before she was supposed to give birth but actually lost the baby in a
miscarriage.
I thought, “Either he’s dropped us a big clue or he’s dropped us a
big red herring,” and it turned out to be the latter when Detective Strickland
announces that of the three women, Marla is the only one who has an alibi (it’s
not specified but she’s been working as a waitress and apparently she was on
duty when Dominick was killed). Midway through the movie Alison is assaulted in
her home by a large, bald-headed man we assume is a hit man hired by whoever did kill Dominick — whom we presume was part of some
large-scale white-collar crime ring, since though he had no visible legal
employment he’d amassed a fortune of over $4 million and stashed it in a Swiss
bank account — only the man turns out to be a cook at the restaurant where
Marla works and she put him
up to the assault. There’s also a former boyfriend of Alison’s, Graham (Brett
Donahue), whom sbe caught in flagrante delicto with her best friend and responded to by clonging
him over the head with one of his tennis rackets — one of the elements in
Alison’s past record that briefly has Detective Sunderland convinced that she’s
Dominick’s killer — and Graham is now married, though writer Phillips doesn’t
specify whether his wife is Alison’s former best friend whom they fought over
years before. At one point Marla and Alison let themselves into Cheryl’s
apartment and film her in the shower having sex with a paramour (Simon Alain)
she was apparently dating while Dominick was still alive, and when Cheryl
threatens to prosecute them for blackmail Alison sees Graham asking for legal
advice — on which he begs off, pointing out that she’ll need an experienced
criminal lawyer (which he is not) if the police seriously press charges against
her.
The climax occurs when Marla confronts both Alison and Cheryl with a gun and says she’ll shoot
them both unless one of them confesses to the crime — which Alison does, only
just before Marla is about to kill either her or herself Detective Sunderland
(ya remember Detective Sunderland?) interrupts the proceedings by firing a warning shot through the
window and announcing that they’ve traced the real killer: a fourth woman Dominick was apparently involved with, using
the last name “Passmore” (also an alias on a passport they found for him in a
safe-deposit box which Alison and Marla were able to talk a bank official into
letting them access), who visited that Swiss bank and withdrew just under $1
million from the account (keeping it below seven figures to avoid police and
security-guard scrutiny). They haven’t caught her yet but they have her image
on security video, and with the finger of suspicion definitively removed from
them the three women give Domenick a burial and buy him a huge tombstone
spelling out his three names, his three wives and denouncing him as a cheater.
Then the three women walk off into the sunset — and had James Phillips and
Caroline Lebrèche stopped there, this would have been a much more satisfying movie than it turned out
to be with all the fake endings the
filmmakers stuck on it. I had visions of the three of them moving in together
and starting a Lesbian commune for women who’ve been so mistreated by their
male mates they’ve decided to give up men altogether and try out the Queer side
— but instead Phillips has Detective Sunderland drive up to Alison’s home to
ask her for a date, which she turns down without bothering to explain why
either to him or us.
[Spoiler alert:] Then, in what Phillips obviously intended as a serious
shocker but which seemed just gratuitous and cruel to me, the mystery woman who
grabbed the money from that Swiss bank account, who may or may not be the wife
of Graham the attorney (Alison’s ex), shows up and Phillips asks us to believe
that she and Alison have been in league throughout the movie. When the other
woman asks Alison if she killed Dominick, Alison responds with the old joke, “I
could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” — in other words, yes, even though the scenes we’ve seen of Alison
responding first to her husband’s murder and then to the other two wives he had
indicate that either she’s innocent or she’s a far better actress than Erin
Karpluk, who’s playing her, could ever hope to be. When the producer of Fritz Lang’s final
U.S. film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, inflicted a similar “surprise” ending on him — throughout the film
Dana Andrews has been playing a journalist who wants to expose the evil of
capital punishment by showing how easily an innocent man could be convicted of
murder and sentenced to death, only at the end he turns out to have actually
killed the supposed victim — Lang tried unsuccessfully to talk him out of it.
“I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for one hour and 38
minutes and then in the last two minutes reveal that he’s really a
son-of-a-bitch and that the whole thing is really a joke,” Lang told
interviewers Charles Higham snd Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse. Unfortunately, the producers of All My
Husband’s Wives didn’t get Lang’s memo and
inflicted the same mistake on Labrèche and Phillips — either that, or it was
their own idea. Either way, the ending left a bad taste in my mouth and largely
spoiled what until then had been a deliciously funny romp through good-bad
girlishness and the women’s attempts to get both revenge and money out of their
no-good dead trigamist husband!
Monday, June 15, 2020
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Their Killer Affair (MarVista Entertainment, Cartel Pictures, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. I watched an unusually good Lifetime movie, billed as a “Premiere” and so new that, for the second week in a row, imdb.com didn’t have a page on it yet and I had to filter through other sources on the Internet (particularly a site called https://meaww.com) and frantically scribble down as many names as I could from the opening credits to figure out whom to attribute the quite remarkable quality of this film. It was called — or at least Lifetime called it — Their Killer Affair, and they promoted it with a trailer that suggested a man and a woman, each married to others, would get together and go on a Bonnie-and-Clyde style criminal rampage. The promo even hinted that the male half of this couple was Bisexual, since he was described as being partnered with someone named “Max” — though in the movie itself “Max” turns out to be a woman, police detective Maxine Peyton of the decidedly fictional town of Brixton, California. In the opening scene she and her police partner, Nick Curtis (Brandon Beemer), are sent to investigate the murder of someone who’s been hanged and choked to death in a trailer in what’s obviously been staged to look like an S/M scene gone terribly wrong.
The body turns out to be that of a prominent local plastic surgeon who had a “thing” for erotic asphyxiation and, since his wife wasn’t willing to choke him as part of sex, he joined a Web site called “Adelina Lilly” (based on the real-life cheaters’ Web site “Ashley Madison,” which was exposed a few years ago when anonymous hackers downloaded and posted the real identities of their users — though as I recall most of the “members’ of Ashley Madison weren’t husbands looking for women to cheat with but wives looking to catch their husbands looking for alternative sex partners) to meet women who would be willing partners in what he wanted. Though the producing companies, MarVista Entertainment and Cartel Pictures, are familiar Lifetime names, the director, Chris James, and writers, Sophie Tilson and Shonrah Wakefield, were new to me, and the unusual (for Lifetime scribes) artistry with which Tilson and Wakefield depicted the inevitable scene in which the two cops have to question the victim’s wife is shown in her attitude towards her husband’s murder, which is neither grief nor good-riddance joy but a sort of bored hauteur in which both her vocal inflections and her attitude say, “Why are you bothering me with this shit?” The next murder victim is a Fundamentalist minister who was into being flagellated, ostensibly to purge the demons from his soul but really to get off — after he was beaten his wife would notice that he had an erection (and though the writers don’t say so, he probably immediately demanded sex from her) — and so he joined Adeline Lilly to meet women who’d be willing to flog him, until the site got hacked and he got exposed and ultimately killed.
Then an agent of something called “Incognito” (i.e., “Anonymous”), wearing as close to the V for Vendetta version of the Guy Fawkes mask as MarVista and Cartel could get away with without Warner Bros. and DC Comics suing them, starts hacking into the police video channel and, later, on local TV stations’ news shows boasting about committing the crimes and basically saying they’re killing adulterers to bring them to justice. The third victim is Rick, a long-haired, rail-thin and quite sexy fellow police detective (and director James emphasizes his sex appeal with a lot of mid-shots of his crotch with his police badge pinned next to it) who was also Max’s off-duty husband for 15 years until she got tired of his constant cheating and dumped him. Now Max is with a milquetoast guy named Simon, but Rick warns her that Simon is “a bigger predator than I am” — obviously a clue that Simon himself might be the mystery serial killer. According to U.S. law (at least as depicted in this film), once cops in a local jurisdiction have three recent murders that are similar enough they appear to have been committed by the same killer, they’re declared serial killings and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is called in and takes over the case, though they have the option of inviting the local cops to join them as junior partners on a so-called “task force.” Of course, Max has no intention of letting her case be taken over by an FBI-led “task force” which will relegate her and her fellow local Brixton detectives to supporting roles — especially after further “Incognito” videos appear and she realizes that the culprit, whoever he (or she) may be under the mask, is either a fellow police officer or someone she knows well and is tormenting her in particular.
The woman who set up “Adelina Lilly” becomes victim number four — her body is found by runners along the “Shenandoah Trail” (in California? I don’t think so) — and Max’s friend Jennifer “Jen” Highfield (Alyshia Ochse), who’s been in treatment for sex addiction and in one scene comes on to Max’s boring boyfriend Simon — leading Simon to tell Max that Jen is no longer welcome in their home, which complicates things when Jen’s husband Glenn sees her name and photo on the list of Adelina Lilly’s clients and throws her out and Max wants to take her in. Eventually [spoiler alert!] Glenn turns out to be the real killer — he caught on to Jen’s infidelities early on but decided instead of just killing her to take twisted revenge on all the spouses he could find who were engaged in extra-relational activities. There are other characters as well, including a Latino cop who runs the Brixton PD’s IT department and investigates cyber-crimes — who’ll share his findings with Max but not her partner Nick because, for some reason left powerfully unstated, he just plain doesn’t like Nick. (Thus writers Tilson and Wakefield economically set up both the Latino IT guy and Nick as red herrings.) There are a few silly bits typical of Lifetime’s sloppiness — including one scene in which Max is assaulted inside her own car by a mysterious figure in a black hoodie (black hoodies and accompanying gloves have become de rigueur wear for Lifetime street assailants because they conceal the attacker’s race and gender), though this plot thread gets dropped quickly and we never find out who Max’s attacker was or what his or her motives were.
But the parts of this movie that lapse into Lifetime’s usual formulae are unimportant compared to the many things it does get right, notably the seriousness of tone. Director James stages the whole thing in a kind of dark, matter-of-fact style reminiscent of the more serious British police-procedural telecasts rather than the slam-bang sensationalism of Lifetime’s usual fare, and cinematographer Seth Johnson creates striking images and an overall dark, neo-noir atmosphere a far cry from the unimaginative photography of most Lifetime thrillers. Writers Tilson and Wakefield create an appropriately somber story and avoid Lifetime’s usual sensationalism; they and James show us the murder scenes but in a way designed to shock rather than titillate, and overall they play against the potentials of the story for both sex exploitation and gore. The acting is also quite subtly done — I only wish my online sources gave me more names associated with their parts than just the three listed on https://meaww.com — with Melissa Archer turning in a performance as a tough-as-nails woman cop that isn’t as sexual or in-your-face aggressive as Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but in its way is equally credible, and Brandon Beemer as Nick (who refers to himself as her “work husband” and whom I was hoping would get together with her at the end after Simon was revealed to be the killer, which was where I thought this was going) and the actors playing Simon and Rick also especially powerful. Even macabre plot gimmicks like Max learning that Jen’s been kidnapped when she’s sent a gift-wrapped package containing Jen’s severed finger (still containing her wedding ring, which is how she realizes it’s hers) are used effectively without breaking the overall somber mood of the piece. Their Killer Affair may not have been the movie I was expecting, but in its own right it’s a quite impressive thriller and a far cry from the slovenly sleaziness of all too many Lifetime movies.
Last night at 8 p.m. I watched an unusually good Lifetime movie, billed as a “Premiere” and so new that, for the second week in a row, imdb.com didn’t have a page on it yet and I had to filter through other sources on the Internet (particularly a site called https://meaww.com) and frantically scribble down as many names as I could from the opening credits to figure out whom to attribute the quite remarkable quality of this film. It was called — or at least Lifetime called it — Their Killer Affair, and they promoted it with a trailer that suggested a man and a woman, each married to others, would get together and go on a Bonnie-and-Clyde style criminal rampage. The promo even hinted that the male half of this couple was Bisexual, since he was described as being partnered with someone named “Max” — though in the movie itself “Max” turns out to be a woman, police detective Maxine Peyton of the decidedly fictional town of Brixton, California. In the opening scene she and her police partner, Nick Curtis (Brandon Beemer), are sent to investigate the murder of someone who’s been hanged and choked to death in a trailer in what’s obviously been staged to look like an S/M scene gone terribly wrong.
The body turns out to be that of a prominent local plastic surgeon who had a “thing” for erotic asphyxiation and, since his wife wasn’t willing to choke him as part of sex, he joined a Web site called “Adelina Lilly” (based on the real-life cheaters’ Web site “Ashley Madison,” which was exposed a few years ago when anonymous hackers downloaded and posted the real identities of their users — though as I recall most of the “members’ of Ashley Madison weren’t husbands looking for women to cheat with but wives looking to catch their husbands looking for alternative sex partners) to meet women who would be willing partners in what he wanted. Though the producing companies, MarVista Entertainment and Cartel Pictures, are familiar Lifetime names, the director, Chris James, and writers, Sophie Tilson and Shonrah Wakefield, were new to me, and the unusual (for Lifetime scribes) artistry with which Tilson and Wakefield depicted the inevitable scene in which the two cops have to question the victim’s wife is shown in her attitude towards her husband’s murder, which is neither grief nor good-riddance joy but a sort of bored hauteur in which both her vocal inflections and her attitude say, “Why are you bothering me with this shit?” The next murder victim is a Fundamentalist minister who was into being flagellated, ostensibly to purge the demons from his soul but really to get off — after he was beaten his wife would notice that he had an erection (and though the writers don’t say so, he probably immediately demanded sex from her) — and so he joined Adeline Lilly to meet women who’d be willing to flog him, until the site got hacked and he got exposed and ultimately killed.
Then an agent of something called “Incognito” (i.e., “Anonymous”), wearing as close to the V for Vendetta version of the Guy Fawkes mask as MarVista and Cartel could get away with without Warner Bros. and DC Comics suing them, starts hacking into the police video channel and, later, on local TV stations’ news shows boasting about committing the crimes and basically saying they’re killing adulterers to bring them to justice. The third victim is Rick, a long-haired, rail-thin and quite sexy fellow police detective (and director James emphasizes his sex appeal with a lot of mid-shots of his crotch with his police badge pinned next to it) who was also Max’s off-duty husband for 15 years until she got tired of his constant cheating and dumped him. Now Max is with a milquetoast guy named Simon, but Rick warns her that Simon is “a bigger predator than I am” — obviously a clue that Simon himself might be the mystery serial killer. According to U.S. law (at least as depicted in this film), once cops in a local jurisdiction have three recent murders that are similar enough they appear to have been committed by the same killer, they’re declared serial killings and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is called in and takes over the case, though they have the option of inviting the local cops to join them as junior partners on a so-called “task force.” Of course, Max has no intention of letting her case be taken over by an FBI-led “task force” which will relegate her and her fellow local Brixton detectives to supporting roles — especially after further “Incognito” videos appear and she realizes that the culprit, whoever he (or she) may be under the mask, is either a fellow police officer or someone she knows well and is tormenting her in particular.
The woman who set up “Adelina Lilly” becomes victim number four — her body is found by runners along the “Shenandoah Trail” (in California? I don’t think so) — and Max’s friend Jennifer “Jen” Highfield (Alyshia Ochse), who’s been in treatment for sex addiction and in one scene comes on to Max’s boring boyfriend Simon — leading Simon to tell Max that Jen is no longer welcome in their home, which complicates things when Jen’s husband Glenn sees her name and photo on the list of Adelina Lilly’s clients and throws her out and Max wants to take her in. Eventually [spoiler alert!] Glenn turns out to be the real killer — he caught on to Jen’s infidelities early on but decided instead of just killing her to take twisted revenge on all the spouses he could find who were engaged in extra-relational activities. There are other characters as well, including a Latino cop who runs the Brixton PD’s IT department and investigates cyber-crimes — who’ll share his findings with Max but not her partner Nick because, for some reason left powerfully unstated, he just plain doesn’t like Nick. (Thus writers Tilson and Wakefield economically set up both the Latino IT guy and Nick as red herrings.) There are a few silly bits typical of Lifetime’s sloppiness — including one scene in which Max is assaulted inside her own car by a mysterious figure in a black hoodie (black hoodies and accompanying gloves have become de rigueur wear for Lifetime street assailants because they conceal the attacker’s race and gender), though this plot thread gets dropped quickly and we never find out who Max’s attacker was or what his or her motives were.
But the parts of this movie that lapse into Lifetime’s usual formulae are unimportant compared to the many things it does get right, notably the seriousness of tone. Director James stages the whole thing in a kind of dark, matter-of-fact style reminiscent of the more serious British police-procedural telecasts rather than the slam-bang sensationalism of Lifetime’s usual fare, and cinematographer Seth Johnson creates striking images and an overall dark, neo-noir atmosphere a far cry from the unimaginative photography of most Lifetime thrillers. Writers Tilson and Wakefield create an appropriately somber story and avoid Lifetime’s usual sensationalism; they and James show us the murder scenes but in a way designed to shock rather than titillate, and overall they play against the potentials of the story for both sex exploitation and gore. The acting is also quite subtly done — I only wish my online sources gave me more names associated with their parts than just the three listed on https://meaww.com — with Melissa Archer turning in a performance as a tough-as-nails woman cop that isn’t as sexual or in-your-face aggressive as Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but in its way is equally credible, and Brandon Beemer as Nick (who refers to himself as her “work husband” and whom I was hoping would get together with her at the end after Simon was revealed to be the killer, which was where I thought this was going) and the actors playing Simon and Rick also especially powerful. Even macabre plot gimmicks like Max learning that Jen’s been kidnapped when she’s sent a gift-wrapped package containing Jen’s severed finger (still containing her wedding ring, which is how she realizes it’s hers) are used effectively without breaking the overall somber mood of the piece. Their Killer Affair may not have been the movie I was expecting, but in its own right it’s a quite impressive thriller and a far cry from the slovenly sleaziness of all too many Lifetime movies.
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
The Music Man (Warner Bros., 1962)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the 1962 film The Music Man on Turner Classic Movies (in, blessedly, a letterboxed print). I hadn’t seen it since the 1960’s but I was surprised at how much I remembered — and how much more I “got” now that I’m more familiar with the culture of the period (1912) when it takes place (enough to get that some of the references were actually 1920’s phenomena that were anachronistic for the specified setting). Directed by Morton “Tec” da Costa (a stage director — his only film credits, as far as I know, are this and Auntie Mame, both of which he had previously directed on Broadway) and starring Robert Preston (repeating his role from the stage version after Cary Grant had turned it down — as he would likewise turn down My Fair Lady two years later in favor of the man who created that part on stage, Rex Harrison), it’s a not particularly stylish filming but it does reproduce a finely wrought stage piece and Preston’s overwhelming performance, and Shirley Jones is nice as the ingenue even though this must have been a dèja-vu experience to be stuck back in this kind of role two years after winning the Academy Award for playing a prostitute in Elmer Gantry. What’s strongest about The Music Man is the precision of Meredith Willson’s original piece — the smoothness with which the numbers are integrated into the action and the clever mixture of sentiment and grit (the opening “Rock Island” rap number is superb; not only does it mix speech and song engagingly, it also gives us a lot of exposition and all the backstory we need) throughout the whole piece — even if Ron[ny] Howard’s performance as the little kid (a role Willson said was based on his own boyhood) gets a bit too sticky at times (and his well-showcased inability to sing gets very wearing). While one could easily imagine a more creative, more stylish filmization of this show (imagine it with Vincente Minnelli directing and Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in the leads!), the film we have of The Music Man does a good job of reproducing the stage play and capturing the quirky Meredith Willson humor — and Shirley Jones’ singing is quite nice even though her singing and speaking voices sound so little like each other she sounds like she has a voice double even though she doesn’t! — 3/20/99
Charles and I watched the 1962 film The Music Man on Turner Classic Movies (in, blessedly, a letterboxed print). I hadn’t seen it since the 1960’s but I was surprised at how much I remembered — and how much more I “got” now that I’m more familiar with the culture of the period (1912) when it takes place (enough to get that some of the references were actually 1920’s phenomena that were anachronistic for the specified setting). Directed by Morton “Tec” da Costa (a stage director — his only film credits, as far as I know, are this and Auntie Mame, both of which he had previously directed on Broadway) and starring Robert Preston (repeating his role from the stage version after Cary Grant had turned it down — as he would likewise turn down My Fair Lady two years later in favor of the man who created that part on stage, Rex Harrison), it’s a not particularly stylish filming but it does reproduce a finely wrought stage piece and Preston’s overwhelming performance, and Shirley Jones is nice as the ingenue even though this must have been a dèja-vu experience to be stuck back in this kind of role two years after winning the Academy Award for playing a prostitute in Elmer Gantry. What’s strongest about The Music Man is the precision of Meredith Willson’s original piece — the smoothness with which the numbers are integrated into the action and the clever mixture of sentiment and grit (the opening “Rock Island” rap number is superb; not only does it mix speech and song engagingly, it also gives us a lot of exposition and all the backstory we need) throughout the whole piece — even if Ron[ny] Howard’s performance as the little kid (a role Willson said was based on his own boyhood) gets a bit too sticky at times (and his well-showcased inability to sing gets very wearing). While one could easily imagine a more creative, more stylish filmization of this show (imagine it with Vincente Minnelli directing and Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in the leads!), the film we have of The Music Man does a good job of reproducing the stage play and capturing the quirky Meredith Willson humor — and Shirley Jones’ singing is quite nice even though her singing and speaking voices sound so little like each other she sounds like she has a voice double even though she doesn’t! — 3/20/99
•••••
Last night’s “feature” was The
Music Man, a 1962 Warner Bros. production
based on Meredith Willson’s nostalgic musical set in the fictitious “River
City, Iowa” but inspired by Willson’s own boyhood in the real (and mentioned in
the score in a list of Iowa towns that also included Bix Beiderbecke’s
birthplace, Davenport — well, you didn’t think I could write a blog post about
a musical set in Iowa in 1912 and not mention Bix, did you?) Mason City and inspired by a traveling music
teacher who had come to town during Willson’s boyhood. I remember not only that
I saw this movie in a theatre when it was new (remember movie
theatres?) but that my mom had the
soundtrack album, whose liner notes were by Willson himself. In them he took
pride that he and Frank Loesser were the only two people who had written entire
Broadway musicals —book, lyrics and
music — that had become hits. He also recalled his boyhood amazement that
someone who played the flute was called a “flautist” — he thought a “flautist”
should be someone who played the “flaut,” only there is no such thing. The
Music Man premiered on Broadway in 1957
with Robert Preston as Professor Harold Hill, a traveling con man who does a
boys’ band scam in small town (collecting money for instruments, band uniforms
and instruction books, then getting out of town with his ill-gotten gains) and
Barbara Cook as Marian Paroo (what sort of last name is that? It certainly doesn’t sound Irish, which Marian and
her mom, played by the great comedienne Pert Kelton are supposed to be), the
town librarian, with whom he has one of those hate-at-first-sight courtships
that of course blossoms into true love.
The show opens with “Rock Island,” set
on a train going from Illinois through Iowa, in which a group of traveling
salesmen are talking about the horrible Professor Harold Hill and how con
artists like him are ruining the prospects for genuine salesmen like himself —
and the whole number is in cadenced speech, with the sounds of the actual train
cued in to match the rhythms of the song. With my dedication to exposing
instances of what I call “first-itis” — the tendency of biographers in all
media to proclaim that the people they’re biographing were the first people to
do something when they weren’t — just after “Rock Island” ended I told Charles,
“So much for the myth that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was the first rap musical.” Indeed, stuck with a
highly charismatic performer in the lead but one without that much of a singing
voice, Willson made Robert Preston’s big numbers on the same cusp between
singing and rapping as Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe had with Rex
Harrison’s big numbers in My Fair Lady (and would do again with Richard Burton in Camelot) — and Irving Berlin had done in the 1929 movie Hallelujah! in which the male lead — Daniel Haynes, playing a
Black revival preacher in the South — shaded over from spoken sermonizing into
rapping and then all-out singing of Berlin’s big song, “Waiting at the End of
the Road.” Preston had had a strange career trajectory; he had got a big star
buildup from Paramount in the early 1940’s that got short-circuited by the 1942
film This Gun for Hire, in which
Preston played an undercover cop who goes after a hired killer. The film was a
huge hit, but it was stolen out from under Preston by Alan Ladd, who played the
hired killer — so it was Ladd who got the big star buildup and Preston who
retreated to Broadway and remained mostly a stage performer until his
unexpected movie comeback as the Gay director of the drag show featuring Julie
Andrews as a woman playing a man playing a woman in 1982’s Victor/Victoria.
Preston was so obviously “right” for the role it
seems strange that Warner Bros. considered using someone else in the lead —
among the people they offered it to were Frank Sinatra, Dan Dailey and Cary
Grant, who reportedly told Jack Warner, “Not only will I not play in The
Music Man, but if you cast anyone other
than Robert Preston I won’t even go see it.” (He reportedly made a similar
threat in 1964 when Jack Warner, who apparently hadn’t learned his lesson,
offered Grant the role of Professor Henry Higgins in the film of Rex Harrison’s
great stage vehicle My Fair Lady.)
Jack Warner did recast the female
lead with Shirley Jones, thinking Barbara Cook had been almost exclusively a
stage star and he wanted someone with movie “cred” — and Jones had it in
spades, having played similar roles in the films of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and Carousel (as Charles pointed out, in those films as well as in The
Music Man Jones played women in love with
abusive men — and from what I’ve heard of Jones’ real-life marriages to Jack
Cassidy and Marty Ingels, her actual husbands weren’t much better) and having
won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her anti-type casting as a
prostitute in Elmer Gantry. The
imdb.com “Trivia” posters noted that Jones nailed the part well enough that the
film didn’t run into critical brickbats from outraged Barbara Cook partisans
the way My Fair Lady did when
Jack Warner took the female lead from Julie Andrews and gave it to Audrey
Hepburn — though no doubt it helped that Jones could really sing whereas, after
Hepburn recorded two My Fair Lady songs, Warner decided her voice wasn’t good enough and brought in Marni Nixon to dub
her. (Oddly, though it’s really Shirley Jones’ voice throughout, her pitch when
she sang was discernibly lower than when she spoke. It’s noticeable throughout
the movie and in her later TV series The Partridge Family as well.)
The Music Man is a start-to-finish delight; it’s true one could
nit-pick it to death for the anachronisms (it’s supposed to be set in 1912 but
much of the music was played with the loping swing sound more characteristic of
the 1920’s or 1930’s, though some imdb.com posters got details wrong — there are cars in the movie, uneasily sharing the streets with
horse-drawn carriages, and in one sequence to a song called ‘Pick a Little,
Talk a Little” Willson compares gossiping women to clucking chickens and
director Morton DaCosta cuts between the women and a flock of actual chickens,
then back — one imdb.com contributor called this a fantasy sequence but it was
a simple cut, and in a rural town like River City, Iowa in 1912 it would not
have been an uncommon sight to see farm animals in the streets) and for Robert
Preston’s overbearing performance: it’s great for the larger-than-life
character be’s playing her but one can tell why he never became a movie star.
But I was blown away by this movie when I saw it as a kid and I still am —
especially since now I “got” references like Hill’s hope in the song “The
Sadder but Wiser Girl” for “Hester to win just one more ‘A’” which had sailed
over my head at age eight. Though the color isn’t as vivid or neon-bright as
three-strip Technicolor was in its 1940’s heyday, it’s still rich and a far cry
from the dirty greens and browns that dominate most films today, and the
winning sincerity of Shirley Jones and the just-kidding cheekiness of Robert
Preston’s con-man performance (this is probably the best film made about con
artists between the W. C. Fields vehicles of the 1930’s and The Sting in the 1970’s) along with a rich supporting cast
full of old-line character actors (notably Hermione Gingold, who plays the wife
of the mayor of River City and who makes a great effect when, as one of the
do-gooder matrons upbraiding Marian for making “dirty books” by people like
Chaucer, Rabelais and Baizac, she majestically intones the last name as
“BALLS-ac”) as well as Buddy Hackett (playing an old friend of Hill’s who’s
settled in River City and a legit job as a blacksmith’s assistant until Hill
drafts him to help his “con”) doing a number called “Shipoopi” about girls who
won’t let boys kiss them until the third date (it was supposedly 192 slang but
Willson actually made it up) and looking even more than usual like Lou
Costello. (In 1954 Hackett filled in for an ailing Costello in a film called Fireman,
Save My Child, and in 1978 he played Costello in a TV-movie biopic, Bud and Lou.)
About the only thing about this movie that bothers
me is the ending, in which the boys of River City save Hill’s bacon by staging
a band practice in which they play a predictably awful but still within hailing
distance of music rendition of Beethoven’s “Minuet in G.” The film then dissolves
into shots of a real marching band — actually an all-star ensemble of the
various top L.A.-area college bands of the period — marching through River City
and playing an impeccable version of the show’s big hit, “76 Trombones,” as
DaCosta cuts to the principals of the movie and runs titles under their images
identifying them. Given that the kids have had utterly no training on their
instruments beyond Hill leading them in group sings, and in particular they’d
have had no way of knowing that you can’t get a brass instrument to sound in
pitch just by blowing through it (you have to make a “razzberry” noise to get
the horn to vibrate), it seems to me that the only way they could possibly have
played the Minuet in G even passably well was if Marian, who moonlights as a
piano teacher at night and is therefore the only person in town with a clue about music and how to
teach people to play it, and I would have liked to see a scene in which she
smiled at Hill as it dawned on him that she had saved Hill’s reputation by secretly teaching the
boys the basics. The script for The Music Man has some intriguing credits: the credits are
Frederick Lacey and Marion Hargrove, the latter of whom wrote See
Here, Private Hargrove about his
experiences as a World War II draftee — it and his immediate sequel, What
Now, Corporal Hargrove?, got made into
movies in the 1940’s with Robert Walker playing him — and these credits and his
real-life small-town background made him one of Hollywood’s go-to guys for
stories about small towns.
The director, Morton DaCosta, has only four film
credits on imdb.com and was primarily a stage director — though when Rosalind
Russell agreed to repeat her stage role in Auntie Mame on film she insisted that DaCosta, who’d directed
her on stage, make the movie as well. In Auntie Mame DaCosta — whom Russell nicknamed “Tec” because she
thought he was especially good at the technical aspects of directing —
punctuated the movie with asides from Mame commenting on the action, filmed as
iris shots with Russell’s face spotlit in a circular close-up against an
otherwise all-black screen. He used this technique again, albeit more
sparingly, in The Music Man as
well — notably in the sequence in which the local barbershop quartet (played by
a real quartet called the Buffalo
Bills) and Shirley Jones sing two songs simultaneously in counterpoint for a
haunting effect in both sight and sound. (The only other director I can think
of who used an iris shot in a sound film is Orson Welles, at the end of the
snow scene in The Magnificent Ambersons.) There are lot of really weird, quirky stories about The
Music Man — including that Shirley Jones
was pregnant with her second son, Patrick Cassidy, while she was making it, and
while DaCosta insisted he could cover for her Robert Preston noticed when he
embraced her for their big love scene and the young, as yet unborn Patrick
kicked him in the stomach. (Years later Preston visited a theatre that was
doing a stage revival of The Music Man in which Shirley Jones was playing the mother of her character here —
and Patrick Cassidy was the star.) And of course I couldn’t help but make a few
jokes about the subsequent fates of some of the actors: when Ronny Howard as
Marian’s lisping and much younger
brother Winthrop begged off from a picnic date with Amaryllis (Monique
Vermont), I joked he’d tell her, “I’m going to a picture show — and some day
I’m going to direct them!” And when Marian’s mother was badgering her to get
married, I thought she could have told her, “Actually I had a dream in which I did get married, and had five kids — and then he died
and the kids and I had to start a singing group to make ends meet!” — 6/9/20
Monday, June 8, 2020
Is My Daughter Really Dead? (Dawn’s Light, Residue Remains Productions, MarVista Entertainment, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched last night’s Lifetime movie, which was billed as a “Premiere” even though the copyright date was 2019 rather than 2020 and it’s been out long enough imdb.com not only had a page on it (which they hadn’t for the previous night’s Lifetime movie, Psycho Yoga Instructor) but the page contained a review from someone who’d never heard the term “gaslighting” before and didn’t realize it had nothing to do with actually burning anything down. The film is called Is My Daughter Really Dead? and centers around the Whitmore family: husband Layne (Matthew Pohlkamp), wife Olivia (Zoë McClellan), and teenage daughter Hannah (Stevie Lynn Jones). The husband has some sort of well-paying job, though writers Colin Edward Lawrence (who also directed) and Erin Murphy West never bother to tell us what it is, and he’s put up the seed capital for his wife to open an art gallery. They were formerly living in Seattle but have since moved to the more rural town in Washington state where Layne grew up to try to save their marriage. Their marriage is on the rocks because Layne had an affair with another woman —Lawrence and West don’t tell us who until the film is almost over, but Charles guessed her identity almost immediately and the filmmakers ultimately took their story exactly where he’d said they would.
For the first half-hour Is My Daughter Really Dead? is actually a surprisingly good movie about the breakup of a marriage and the bitterness of daughter Hannah, who clearly always liked her dad better than her mom, over the way mom has sent her packing. Hannah only gets more bitter when her dad is killed in a car crash — at least that’s what she, her mom and we are told — and she’s clearly blaming her mom for her dad’s death. Just then an African-American single mom, Mary Cooper (Stephanie Charles), and her daughter Sydney (Ryan Madison), move in next door and the plot really begins to boil. The Coopers invite Olivia and Hannah to join them on a weekend camping trip; Olivia begs off because she has to get her gallery ready for its grand opening, but Hannah goes — only when Olivia tries to call her daughter during the weekend her calls go straight to voicemail, and when the Coopers return they tell Olivia they took the trip alone after Hannah didn’t show. Olivia tries to report her daughter to the police as missing but the detective she tries to report it to, Bruce Chambers (Chris Dougherty), takes her not to the police station but to the live-work space of his wife, therapist Lisa Chambers (Samantha Colburn), who tells Olivia she missed their therapy appointment. Olivia protests that it’s her daughter who had the appointment, not her, but Lisa not only insists on seeing Olivia professionally, she tells her both her ex-husband and their daughter were killed in the car crash and she’s having a serious case of dissociation over her denial that her daughter is dead.
A frantic Olivia looks for proof that Hannah is still alive — or at least was after her husband was killed — and her only allies are Jack Daly (Mike Erwin), an artist who was exhibiting at her gallery and was attracted to her romantically (Layne accused Olivia of having an affair with Jack, obviously to defend himself against her charges of infidelity; they weren’t, but it increased his bitterness against his wife); and Genevieve, a caterer Olivia had hired to provide food for her gallery opening and saw Hannah alive after her dad died when she went to the gallery to present Olivia her bill — only as soon as Genevieve calls Olivia to tell her she’ll be willing to tell the cops she saw Hannah after her dad’s accident, a mysterious stranger in a black hoodie and gloves (so you can’t tell what gender or race they are) stabs her, presumably to death, though we don’t see the body afterwards and are never told whether the police recovered it. The climax occurs when Olivia thinks of looking for Hannah at her ex-husband’s cabin outside Seattle — not another Lifetime movie whose climax takes place at a mountain cabin! And at least this one has cell-phone reception (previously Lifetime writers set their climaxes at mountain cabins so the characters would be out of cell-phone range and therefore couldn’t call the police) — where Olivia has gone but made the mistake of asking Mary Cooper to drive her. Spoiler alert [though Charles had guessed it almost an hour and a half’s worth of running time earlier, no fool he) Mary Cooper is the woman her husband was having an affair with. What’s more, Layne Whitmore didn’t die at all — the body was burned beyond recognition and was actually that of a hitchhiker he’d picked up along the way — and once Layne crawled out from under the wreckage of his car he hatched a plot to hide himself and Hannah at the cabin and enlist the aid of Mary, Bruce and Lisa to make it look like Olivia was crazy and get her incarcerated in a mental institution. Only now that Olivia has seen him alive, he and Mary determine they’ll have to kill her and kill Hannah for good measure — even though Layne’s original purpose was to drive his wife crazy so his daughter would accept Mary Cooper as her new mom.
Bruce Chambers — who is, after all, a police officer — shoots both Layne and Mary, leaving Hannah back with her mom, Sydney (who wasn’t a part of her mother’s machinations, though mom did get her to lie that Hannah hadn’t been on their camping trip) back in Seattle with an aunt willing to raise her, Bruce and Lisa Chambers in prison (presumably awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit murder) and Olivia and Jack sucking face in the gallery in a postlude set “Four Months Later.” Though the script for this movie specifically used the term “gaslighting” — which comes from the two film versions of Patrick Hamilton’s play Angel Street, in 1939 in Britain with Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook and far more famously five years later in Hollywood with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, about a woman wooed and then deliberately driven crazy by a husband who married her only to get the fortune in stolen merchandise hidden in her house — the plot against Olivia involves so many people it seemed more like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film The Lady Vanishes than like Gaslight to me. Is My Daughter Really Dead? is an example of a Lifetime film that’s really trying to be above the channel’s norm, but the “surprise” twists are too obvious and Lawrence really isn’t a good enough suspense director to make a story like this work as well as Hitchcock or Gaslight director George Cukor did. Indeed, though this was a more “respectable” production and quite a bit better cast (though one wonders why casting director Ricki Master picked three actors for the male leads who look quite a bit alike), Psycho Yoga Instructor was better fun even though (or maybe because) it was so much sleazier!
Charles and I watched last night’s Lifetime movie, which was billed as a “Premiere” even though the copyright date was 2019 rather than 2020 and it’s been out long enough imdb.com not only had a page on it (which they hadn’t for the previous night’s Lifetime movie, Psycho Yoga Instructor) but the page contained a review from someone who’d never heard the term “gaslighting” before and didn’t realize it had nothing to do with actually burning anything down. The film is called Is My Daughter Really Dead? and centers around the Whitmore family: husband Layne (Matthew Pohlkamp), wife Olivia (Zoë McClellan), and teenage daughter Hannah (Stevie Lynn Jones). The husband has some sort of well-paying job, though writers Colin Edward Lawrence (who also directed) and Erin Murphy West never bother to tell us what it is, and he’s put up the seed capital for his wife to open an art gallery. They were formerly living in Seattle but have since moved to the more rural town in Washington state where Layne grew up to try to save their marriage. Their marriage is on the rocks because Layne had an affair with another woman —Lawrence and West don’t tell us who until the film is almost over, but Charles guessed her identity almost immediately and the filmmakers ultimately took their story exactly where he’d said they would.
For the first half-hour Is My Daughter Really Dead? is actually a surprisingly good movie about the breakup of a marriage and the bitterness of daughter Hannah, who clearly always liked her dad better than her mom, over the way mom has sent her packing. Hannah only gets more bitter when her dad is killed in a car crash — at least that’s what she, her mom and we are told — and she’s clearly blaming her mom for her dad’s death. Just then an African-American single mom, Mary Cooper (Stephanie Charles), and her daughter Sydney (Ryan Madison), move in next door and the plot really begins to boil. The Coopers invite Olivia and Hannah to join them on a weekend camping trip; Olivia begs off because she has to get her gallery ready for its grand opening, but Hannah goes — only when Olivia tries to call her daughter during the weekend her calls go straight to voicemail, and when the Coopers return they tell Olivia they took the trip alone after Hannah didn’t show. Olivia tries to report her daughter to the police as missing but the detective she tries to report it to, Bruce Chambers (Chris Dougherty), takes her not to the police station but to the live-work space of his wife, therapist Lisa Chambers (Samantha Colburn), who tells Olivia she missed their therapy appointment. Olivia protests that it’s her daughter who had the appointment, not her, but Lisa not only insists on seeing Olivia professionally, she tells her both her ex-husband and their daughter were killed in the car crash and she’s having a serious case of dissociation over her denial that her daughter is dead.
A frantic Olivia looks for proof that Hannah is still alive — or at least was after her husband was killed — and her only allies are Jack Daly (Mike Erwin), an artist who was exhibiting at her gallery and was attracted to her romantically (Layne accused Olivia of having an affair with Jack, obviously to defend himself against her charges of infidelity; they weren’t, but it increased his bitterness against his wife); and Genevieve, a caterer Olivia had hired to provide food for her gallery opening and saw Hannah alive after her dad died when she went to the gallery to present Olivia her bill — only as soon as Genevieve calls Olivia to tell her she’ll be willing to tell the cops she saw Hannah after her dad’s accident, a mysterious stranger in a black hoodie and gloves (so you can’t tell what gender or race they are) stabs her, presumably to death, though we don’t see the body afterwards and are never told whether the police recovered it. The climax occurs when Olivia thinks of looking for Hannah at her ex-husband’s cabin outside Seattle — not another Lifetime movie whose climax takes place at a mountain cabin! And at least this one has cell-phone reception (previously Lifetime writers set their climaxes at mountain cabins so the characters would be out of cell-phone range and therefore couldn’t call the police) — where Olivia has gone but made the mistake of asking Mary Cooper to drive her. Spoiler alert [though Charles had guessed it almost an hour and a half’s worth of running time earlier, no fool he) Mary Cooper is the woman her husband was having an affair with. What’s more, Layne Whitmore didn’t die at all — the body was burned beyond recognition and was actually that of a hitchhiker he’d picked up along the way — and once Layne crawled out from under the wreckage of his car he hatched a plot to hide himself and Hannah at the cabin and enlist the aid of Mary, Bruce and Lisa to make it look like Olivia was crazy and get her incarcerated in a mental institution. Only now that Olivia has seen him alive, he and Mary determine they’ll have to kill her and kill Hannah for good measure — even though Layne’s original purpose was to drive his wife crazy so his daughter would accept Mary Cooper as her new mom.
Bruce Chambers — who is, after all, a police officer — shoots both Layne and Mary, leaving Hannah back with her mom, Sydney (who wasn’t a part of her mother’s machinations, though mom did get her to lie that Hannah hadn’t been on their camping trip) back in Seattle with an aunt willing to raise her, Bruce and Lisa Chambers in prison (presumably awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit murder) and Olivia and Jack sucking face in the gallery in a postlude set “Four Months Later.” Though the script for this movie specifically used the term “gaslighting” — which comes from the two film versions of Patrick Hamilton’s play Angel Street, in 1939 in Britain with Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook and far more famously five years later in Hollywood with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, about a woman wooed and then deliberately driven crazy by a husband who married her only to get the fortune in stolen merchandise hidden in her house — the plot against Olivia involves so many people it seemed more like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film The Lady Vanishes than like Gaslight to me. Is My Daughter Really Dead? is an example of a Lifetime film that’s really trying to be above the channel’s norm, but the “surprise” twists are too obvious and Lawrence really isn’t a good enough suspense director to make a story like this work as well as Hitchcock or Gaslight director George Cukor did. Indeed, though this was a more “respectable” production and quite a bit better cast (though one wonders why casting director Ricki Master picked three actors for the male leads who look quite a bit alike), Psycho Yoga Instructor was better fun even though (or maybe because) it was so much sleazier!
Sunday, June 7, 2020
Psycho Yoga Instructor (Johnny Bravo, Exit 19 Productions, Strike Accord, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 last night I watched a Lifetime movie whose title seemed to be the result of a brainstorming session among Lifetime’s regular writers to come up with the absolutely silliest possible title for a Lifetime movie: Psycho Yoga Instructor. It was written by Robert Black and directed by Brian Herzlinger, who apparently has enough of a reputation that he gets a possessory credit (“A Brian Herzlinger Film”) and Panos Vlahos (which sounds like something you’d order at a Greek restaurant), who plays the title role, gave a comment on one of the Web sites I looked up for information about this film to the effect that he was really looking forward to the chance to work with such a well-regarded director. What Black and Herzlinger came up with was a so totally by-the-numbers Lifetime thriller you could practically write it yourself: Justine “Jessie” Grace (Ashley Wood, top-billed) is a schoolteacher facing the ennui of her summer break. She’s unhappily married to attorney Tom Grace (Brady Smith), who’s so busy that he’s often going out of town, and even on the rare occasions when he is in town he’s set up a home office in their house so he can work from home, which he does so far into the wee hours he sleeps far more often at his office chair or on the couch he’s equipped the home office with than in the bed he nominally shares with his wife.
The other big flash point in their relationship is their inability to have children — we’re eventually told the biological problem is his, not hers — which has led them to a frustrating round of calling adoption agencies and even picking out potential adoptees, only to have the agency personnel tell them that for whatever unspecified but unappealable criteria they use, they’ve deemed the Graces an unsuitable “match” for the baby they were ready to adopt and raise. (The near-fascistic attitudes of adoption agencies towards prospective parents — as well as the very real dangers to the children involved if an agency guesses wrong — are the stuff of quite a few movies in this genre, and some real-life situations as well: Joan Crawford couldn’t pass the parental suitability tests of the above-board adoption agencies of her time, and so she got her four kids through bootleg child brokers.) The combination of an absent husband and the collapse of her plan to adopt leaves Justine devastated, so her best friend Ginnie (Lily Rains) suggests she start taking yoga classes as a way of getting more centered and getting her mind off the traumas in her life. So she does that, only she makes the mistake of enrolling in a class led by Mr. Psycho Yoga Instructor himself.
At 8 last night I watched a Lifetime movie whose title seemed to be the result of a brainstorming session among Lifetime’s regular writers to come up with the absolutely silliest possible title for a Lifetime movie: Psycho Yoga Instructor. It was written by Robert Black and directed by Brian Herzlinger, who apparently has enough of a reputation that he gets a possessory credit (“A Brian Herzlinger Film”) and Panos Vlahos (which sounds like something you’d order at a Greek restaurant), who plays the title role, gave a comment on one of the Web sites I looked up for information about this film to the effect that he was really looking forward to the chance to work with such a well-regarded director. What Black and Herzlinger came up with was a so totally by-the-numbers Lifetime thriller you could practically write it yourself: Justine “Jessie” Grace (Ashley Wood, top-billed) is a schoolteacher facing the ennui of her summer break. She’s unhappily married to attorney Tom Grace (Brady Smith), who’s so busy that he’s often going out of town, and even on the rare occasions when he is in town he’s set up a home office in their house so he can work from home, which he does so far into the wee hours he sleeps far more often at his office chair or on the couch he’s equipped the home office with than in the bed he nominally shares with his wife.
The other big flash point in their relationship is their inability to have children — we’re eventually told the biological problem is his, not hers — which has led them to a frustrating round of calling adoption agencies and even picking out potential adoptees, only to have the agency personnel tell them that for whatever unspecified but unappealable criteria they use, they’ve deemed the Graces an unsuitable “match” for the baby they were ready to adopt and raise. (The near-fascistic attitudes of adoption agencies towards prospective parents — as well as the very real dangers to the children involved if an agency guesses wrong — are the stuff of quite a few movies in this genre, and some real-life situations as well: Joan Crawford couldn’t pass the parental suitability tests of the above-board adoption agencies of her time, and so she got her four kids through bootleg child brokers.) The combination of an absent husband and the collapse of her plan to adopt leaves Justine devastated, so her best friend Ginnie (Lily Rains) suggests she start taking yoga classes as a way of getting more centered and getting her mind off the traumas in her life. So she does that, only she makes the mistake of enrolling in a class led by Mr. Psycho Yoga Instructor himself.
His name is Domenic Romero (Panos Vlahos) — at
least that’s the name he’s using now — and his schtick, as we learn eventually (very eventually — the film is half over before Domenic
does anything that even looks vaguely psycho and it’s only at the three-quarter mark that we get the
definitive evidence that he’s dangerous and out to menace and quite possibly do
in Our Heroine), is to fasten on an unhappily married woman in his class, offer
her private instruction, romance and seduce her, get her to leave her husband
for him, and then at best abandon her and at worst kill her. We see him fulfill
this pattern with Justine to the point of giving her “private” training at her
home (one of their sessions is interrupted by the sudden return of her husband,
who on this of all days decided he was going to swing home and eat lunch there
instead of a restaurant or in his workplace office) and kissing her, though
writer Black makes sure the only
reason good little Justine was even tempted to have an affair with Domenic the Psycho Yoga
Instructor was she thought her husband was cheating on her, via a phone message from a woman identified only as
“S.” which she spotted on his phone. It turns out “S.” was merely a woman named
Stephanie who runs an adoption agency that competes with the one that’s already
rejected the Graces and whom Tom was sounding out for a potential child for
them, but in the meantime the damage has been done and that one kiss has
convinced Domenic that he and Justine are soulmates and he’ll literally do anything to possess her — or to kill her if he can’t.
Since
the film has featured a number of nightmares Justine has had in her bed
(especially during all those lonely nights she’s had to sleep in it alone even
though she’s not only at least nominally married but her husband is at least there in the house!) in which she drowns — she’s been
having them even before she
started taking yoga and met Domenic and she has another one afterwards in which
she and Domenic are having hot sex on the bathroom counter while her husband
desperately struggles to get out of the tub where he’s drowning (the only soft-core porn scene we get since
Black stresses that she and Domenic never actually do the down-’n’-dirty with each other — thereby denying
himself a much more potentially powerful dramatic issue than the ones he
actually used, more on that later) — of course the desperate climax happens in
the bathroom, where Domenic is holding a knife to Justine’s neck and
threatening to kill her if she doesn’t agree to love him and leave her husband
for him. Eventually Justine escapes long enough for the cops — summoned by
Lily, who researched Domenic’s background online and found his real name was
Sebastian Nikos but he’s worked under several aliases, in one of which he
called himself “Elijah” and ruined the life of a woman who confronts him in his
class session (alas not one
Justine is attending!) and tells him (and us) she left her husband and children
to be with him, and then he rejected her and fled.
Justine’s life is saved, she
and Tom reconcile and he tells her that it looks like that mysterious adoption
agency called “S.” has actually found them a suitable child and will let them
become parents at long last. Unfortunately, Black decided to end the film with
one of those maddening Lifetime endings in which Domenic, Sebastian, Elijah or
whatever his name is escapes and sets up shop in another town, where he’s heard
going through the same moth-eaten spiels he was using on Justine’s class at the
beginning. Where I had thought
this was going was that Domenic and Justine actually would have sex together and he’d get her pregnant —
thereby leaving both her and Tom in a horrible dilemma: abort the child after
they’ve been hoping for one for so long, or raise it as their own and leave Tom
with the long-term knowledge that the only way he was able to become a father
was for his wife to have an affair and he’s raising someone else’s baby but not in the way he had anticipated and hoped for. And of
course they’d also be worried that their child would inherit the
psychopathologies of his or her real dad.
One other thing that disappointed me
about Psycho Yoga Instructor was
that there was virtually no background about Domenic’s character, no indication
of what made him “run,” no hints of ghastly happenings in his childhood that
shaped him into becoming the monster he was. Christine Conradt would have given
us something to explain him and
maybe even make us feel a little sorry for him — I like dramatic ambiguity and
I also think it’s good storytelling to give your villain some minor human
qualities that make him quasi-likable so when he does go off the rails and start doing evil things, it’s
more of a shock. It’s also curious that this film’s casting director picked (or
got stuck with) two not very attractive people for both the male leads: instead of the tall, lanky,
sandy-haired type Lifetime usually hires to play the innocent milquetoast
husbands, Brady Smith is built like a linebacker and has the sort of face that
makes him look like he worked his way through law school by prizefighting and
did that about a year or two too long. And Panos Vlahos looks appropriately sexy at first but ultimately he seems
just too disheveled and seedy to attract the sort of bored women in unhappy
marriages we’re told are his “type.” The film was shot under the working title The
Perfect Pose — a marvelous play on words
(“pose” meaning a yoga position and also the false identity Domenic assumes to
go after his female prey), but time and time again the mavens at Lifetime have
changed an ironic and compelling title to one that makes it all too plain and
obvious what the movie is about.
Saturday, June 6, 2020
I Love You, Man (Paramount, DreamWorks, De Line Pictures, Bernard Gale Productions, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Friday night my husband Charles came home unexpectedly early from work last night and I took advantage by running a movie, I Love You, Man, a 2009 comedy starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segal five years after Rudd’s star-making turn in a film called The 40-Year-Old Virgin. This time Rudd’s character, real-estate broker Peter Klaven, doesn’t have any trouble attracting (or bedding) women — he’s gone through a series of girlfriends before finally getting “serious” with Zooey Rice (Rashida Jones), to the point of proposing to her and booking the resort where they first had sex (only oral, since she was having her period at the time —one of the bits of way too much information writers John Hamburg, who also directed, and Larry Levin feel obliged to give us about the characters’ sex lives). He proposed to Zooey (whose name I imagined throughout the movie was given the classier spelling “Zoë” — and let’s face it, Rashida Jones looks more like a Zoë than a Zooey) on the site of a real-estate development he wants to build as soon as he gets the money for it with his commission on selling “the Ferrigno house.”
“As in Lou Ferrigno?” I wondered — and not only is it a reference to Lou Ferrigno’s house (though I suspect what we actually see is the famous Richard Neutra house in Hollywood commissioned by and built for director Josef von Sternberg, though when his career fell on hard times he was forced to sell it and the buyer, Ayn Rand, typically told people she had commissioned it and it had been built especially for her), but Ferrigno is actually in this movie playing himself. What kicks off the plot of this film is that, though Peter has a fiancée, a wedding date and a family consisting of dad Oswald (J. K. Simmons, whom I knew as police psychiatrist Dr. Emil Skoda from the original Law and Order), mom (Jane Curtin from the original cast of Saturday Night Live) and Gay brother Robbie (played by one of the film’s producers, Andy Samberg, after the actor they originally got proved so unsatisfactory they fired him during the first week of production), whom dad always said he liked best (apparently dad is a good enough liberal he makes a big show of accepting his Gay son while his straight son gets lost in the shuffle). At least Robbie, unlike virtually all movie Gay men, is seen in romantic or sexual situations with other men; he explains to Peter that in his job as a physical fitness trainer, he likes to cruise his straight clients because “they’re more of a challenge” (and indeed we see one such man apparently reciprocating Robbie’s flirting).
But with his wedding date coming up quickly Peter realizes with a start that he doesn’t have any close male friends he can ask to be his best man, so he sets about looking for one. Most of I Love You, Man is a one-joke movie, but the one joke is reasonably funny and sometimes hits surprisingly close to home. The one joke is that Peter’s attempts to find a male best friend — even though a best friend is all he’s interested in — comes off surprisingly like a courtship ritual: the anxieties of meeting someone for the first time, of wondering whether it’s too soon to call him again and waiting for him to call you, the dreary attempts at dates, the disappointments (one of Peter’s friend-dates turns out to be an 89-year-old man named Mel Stein, played by Murray Gershenz, and when he confesses he used a somewhat younger photo for his Internet profile we wonder how much younger and whether the original was on daguerreotype or tintype), the misunderstandings — one O.K. date is with a man named Doug (Thomas Lennon, who played the basketball coach in the Zac Efron vehicle 17 Again, another silly movie from the backlog I ran because I wanted a respite from all the depressing news stories), who ends the evening by planting a big fat kiss on Peter’s mouth. It seems Doug really is Gay, thought that Peter was too, and is disappointed when Peter breaks off their budding relationship — so much so that when he runs into Peter and the new-best-friend he finally ends up with, Doug assumes he’s Peter’s new boyfriend and says, “I just wish I could take back that kiss … because now I know it was the taste of betrayal. … It was the taste of betrayal … you fucking whore!” (Now, how much you want to bet that Doug ends up with Peter’s genuinely Gay brother Robbie by the end of the movie? Yup, that was a plot twist I saw coming from 100 miles away.)
The new-best-friend Peter finally ends up with is Sydney Fife (Jason Segal), whose card says he’s an investment counselor — which could mean anything from he’s super-rich but likes to slum it to he’s a bottom-feeding wanna-be with delusions of making tons of money in the market — and whom Peter meets (meets-cute, really) when Sydney shows up for an open house he’s showing at the Neutra-Sternberg-Rand-Ferrigno place just to sample the hors d’oeuvres. Also in the dramatis personae are Zooey’s best friends Hailey (Sarah Burns), who’s single and man-hungry; and Denise (Jaime Pressly), who’s platinum-haired and married to a boor named Barry who decides to help Peter learn male-bonding by inviting him to his weekly poker night (shades of A Streetcar Named Desire, for which Tennessee Williams’ working title was actually The Poker Night!). Barry, Peter and the other players end up in a beer-drinking contest (one wonders if straight guys who party together always end up acting like such total boors) to see who can drink the most mugs in one swallow, and Peter seems to have “won” when he suddenly heaves and projectile-vomits all over Barry’s suit-clad chest. So the writers can cross off the obligatory puke scene for a modern-day comedy — just as they crossed off the obligatory fart scene at the open house when Sydney spotted a young straight couple who were there to dream about buying a house they couldn’t possibly afford and he notices the male half of this couple clenching his ass cheeks under his white pants trying to repress it. (This is one of the main reasons I generally don’t like modern-day comedies and yearn for the days of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Fields, Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, who could make us laugh without resorting to gross depictions of involuntary bodily functions.)
Nonetheless, Peter and Sydney become best buds largely because Sydney breaks down Peter’s inhibitions; they bond over a common love of the music of Rush (it had to be a band that was still working together and could be signed to appear in the film — which they do, at an impromptu bar concert Sydney gets an invite to and brings Peter and Zooey; the two guys start singing along with the band while Zooey couldn’t be more bored — without asking for stratospheric fees that would have broken the budget Paramount and DreamWorks assigned to this film) and a fun-loving spirit that leads them to do taco dates and drives down Muscle Beach (and we’re supposed to think Peter doesn’t want people to think he’s Gay?) and other movie indicia that Sydney is breaking down his inhibitions and giving him a sense of fun. Meanwhile, Peter’s offensive co-worker Tevin Downey (Rob Huebel) tries to horn in on the Ferrigno house and grab half of Peter’s potential commission, and he boasts that he’s a more credible real-estate salesperson because he’s advertised himself everywhere, even on cakes of toilet-bowl sanitizers — somehow he thinks he can sell more houses if people remember him as a guy whose picture they’ve peed on. (So the writers can check off urination along with vomiting and passing gas as one of the supposedly “funny” ingredients modern-day film comedy makers for some reason think are obligatory.) So Sydney asks to “borrow” $8,000 from Peter and says he needs it for an “investment,” but what he really uses it for is a series of ridiculously tasteless billboards depicting Peter as a beach-blanket stud and as James Bond — and these have the same effect on Peter as the shot of Jack Benny’s attorney character stealing candy from a baby in the 1942 “B” The Meanest Man in the World (a film which could have been a masterpiece if it had had an “A” budget and Preston Sturges as director) had on his career: the big-money offers keep coming in and he easily sells the Ferrigno house and gets the big commission he needed to start his development project. (Ya remember his development project?)
At one point Sydney embarrasses Peter and nearly breaks up him and Zooey by giving explicit details of Peter’s and Zooey’s sex life Peter told Sydney thinking they’d be kept confidential, but by the time the film is over Peter and Zooey have reconciled, as have Peter and Sydney, and the wedding goes off as planned (though I must say I could have wished they could have turned it into a double wedding and married off Robbie and Doug as well! It’s the romantic in me). Throughout much of I Love You, Man I saw it as a screwball comedy in modern drag, and wondered how it might have been done in the 1930’s with Ralph Bellamy as Peter, Carole Lombard as Zooey and Cary Grant as Sydney — though in that version Zooey would have decided Peter was terminally boring and would have run off with Sydney at the end!
Last Friday night my husband Charles came home unexpectedly early from work last night and I took advantage by running a movie, I Love You, Man, a 2009 comedy starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segal five years after Rudd’s star-making turn in a film called The 40-Year-Old Virgin. This time Rudd’s character, real-estate broker Peter Klaven, doesn’t have any trouble attracting (or bedding) women — he’s gone through a series of girlfriends before finally getting “serious” with Zooey Rice (Rashida Jones), to the point of proposing to her and booking the resort where they first had sex (only oral, since she was having her period at the time —one of the bits of way too much information writers John Hamburg, who also directed, and Larry Levin feel obliged to give us about the characters’ sex lives). He proposed to Zooey (whose name I imagined throughout the movie was given the classier spelling “Zoë” — and let’s face it, Rashida Jones looks more like a Zoë than a Zooey) on the site of a real-estate development he wants to build as soon as he gets the money for it with his commission on selling “the Ferrigno house.”
“As in Lou Ferrigno?” I wondered — and not only is it a reference to Lou Ferrigno’s house (though I suspect what we actually see is the famous Richard Neutra house in Hollywood commissioned by and built for director Josef von Sternberg, though when his career fell on hard times he was forced to sell it and the buyer, Ayn Rand, typically told people she had commissioned it and it had been built especially for her), but Ferrigno is actually in this movie playing himself. What kicks off the plot of this film is that, though Peter has a fiancée, a wedding date and a family consisting of dad Oswald (J. K. Simmons, whom I knew as police psychiatrist Dr. Emil Skoda from the original Law and Order), mom (Jane Curtin from the original cast of Saturday Night Live) and Gay brother Robbie (played by one of the film’s producers, Andy Samberg, after the actor they originally got proved so unsatisfactory they fired him during the first week of production), whom dad always said he liked best (apparently dad is a good enough liberal he makes a big show of accepting his Gay son while his straight son gets lost in the shuffle). At least Robbie, unlike virtually all movie Gay men, is seen in romantic or sexual situations with other men; he explains to Peter that in his job as a physical fitness trainer, he likes to cruise his straight clients because “they’re more of a challenge” (and indeed we see one such man apparently reciprocating Robbie’s flirting).
But with his wedding date coming up quickly Peter realizes with a start that he doesn’t have any close male friends he can ask to be his best man, so he sets about looking for one. Most of I Love You, Man is a one-joke movie, but the one joke is reasonably funny and sometimes hits surprisingly close to home. The one joke is that Peter’s attempts to find a male best friend — even though a best friend is all he’s interested in — comes off surprisingly like a courtship ritual: the anxieties of meeting someone for the first time, of wondering whether it’s too soon to call him again and waiting for him to call you, the dreary attempts at dates, the disappointments (one of Peter’s friend-dates turns out to be an 89-year-old man named Mel Stein, played by Murray Gershenz, and when he confesses he used a somewhat younger photo for his Internet profile we wonder how much younger and whether the original was on daguerreotype or tintype), the misunderstandings — one O.K. date is with a man named Doug (Thomas Lennon, who played the basketball coach in the Zac Efron vehicle 17 Again, another silly movie from the backlog I ran because I wanted a respite from all the depressing news stories), who ends the evening by planting a big fat kiss on Peter’s mouth. It seems Doug really is Gay, thought that Peter was too, and is disappointed when Peter breaks off their budding relationship — so much so that when he runs into Peter and the new-best-friend he finally ends up with, Doug assumes he’s Peter’s new boyfriend and says, “I just wish I could take back that kiss … because now I know it was the taste of betrayal. … It was the taste of betrayal … you fucking whore!” (Now, how much you want to bet that Doug ends up with Peter’s genuinely Gay brother Robbie by the end of the movie? Yup, that was a plot twist I saw coming from 100 miles away.)
The new-best-friend Peter finally ends up with is Sydney Fife (Jason Segal), whose card says he’s an investment counselor — which could mean anything from he’s super-rich but likes to slum it to he’s a bottom-feeding wanna-be with delusions of making tons of money in the market — and whom Peter meets (meets-cute, really) when Sydney shows up for an open house he’s showing at the Neutra-Sternberg-Rand-Ferrigno place just to sample the hors d’oeuvres. Also in the dramatis personae are Zooey’s best friends Hailey (Sarah Burns), who’s single and man-hungry; and Denise (Jaime Pressly), who’s platinum-haired and married to a boor named Barry who decides to help Peter learn male-bonding by inviting him to his weekly poker night (shades of A Streetcar Named Desire, for which Tennessee Williams’ working title was actually The Poker Night!). Barry, Peter and the other players end up in a beer-drinking contest (one wonders if straight guys who party together always end up acting like such total boors) to see who can drink the most mugs in one swallow, and Peter seems to have “won” when he suddenly heaves and projectile-vomits all over Barry’s suit-clad chest. So the writers can cross off the obligatory puke scene for a modern-day comedy — just as they crossed off the obligatory fart scene at the open house when Sydney spotted a young straight couple who were there to dream about buying a house they couldn’t possibly afford and he notices the male half of this couple clenching his ass cheeks under his white pants trying to repress it. (This is one of the main reasons I generally don’t like modern-day comedies and yearn for the days of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Fields, Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, who could make us laugh without resorting to gross depictions of involuntary bodily functions.)
Nonetheless, Peter and Sydney become best buds largely because Sydney breaks down Peter’s inhibitions; they bond over a common love of the music of Rush (it had to be a band that was still working together and could be signed to appear in the film — which they do, at an impromptu bar concert Sydney gets an invite to and brings Peter and Zooey; the two guys start singing along with the band while Zooey couldn’t be more bored — without asking for stratospheric fees that would have broken the budget Paramount and DreamWorks assigned to this film) and a fun-loving spirit that leads them to do taco dates and drives down Muscle Beach (and we’re supposed to think Peter doesn’t want people to think he’s Gay?) and other movie indicia that Sydney is breaking down his inhibitions and giving him a sense of fun. Meanwhile, Peter’s offensive co-worker Tevin Downey (Rob Huebel) tries to horn in on the Ferrigno house and grab half of Peter’s potential commission, and he boasts that he’s a more credible real-estate salesperson because he’s advertised himself everywhere, even on cakes of toilet-bowl sanitizers — somehow he thinks he can sell more houses if people remember him as a guy whose picture they’ve peed on. (So the writers can check off urination along with vomiting and passing gas as one of the supposedly “funny” ingredients modern-day film comedy makers for some reason think are obligatory.) So Sydney asks to “borrow” $8,000 from Peter and says he needs it for an “investment,” but what he really uses it for is a series of ridiculously tasteless billboards depicting Peter as a beach-blanket stud and as James Bond — and these have the same effect on Peter as the shot of Jack Benny’s attorney character stealing candy from a baby in the 1942 “B” The Meanest Man in the World (a film which could have been a masterpiece if it had had an “A” budget and Preston Sturges as director) had on his career: the big-money offers keep coming in and he easily sells the Ferrigno house and gets the big commission he needed to start his development project. (Ya remember his development project?)
At one point Sydney embarrasses Peter and nearly breaks up him and Zooey by giving explicit details of Peter’s and Zooey’s sex life Peter told Sydney thinking they’d be kept confidential, but by the time the film is over Peter and Zooey have reconciled, as have Peter and Sydney, and the wedding goes off as planned (though I must say I could have wished they could have turned it into a double wedding and married off Robbie and Doug as well! It’s the romantic in me). Throughout much of I Love You, Man I saw it as a screwball comedy in modern drag, and wondered how it might have been done in the 1930’s with Ralph Bellamy as Peter, Carole Lombard as Zooey and Cary Grant as Sydney — though in that version Zooey would have decided Peter was terminally boring and would have run off with Sydney at the end!
Friday, June 5, 2020
March of the Penguins (National Georgraphic Films, Bonne Pioche, Wild Bunch, Warner Bros., 2005)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened Charles the DVD of the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins. This was a documentary about the elaborate process the emperor penguins of Antarctica have to go through to reproduce — they have to walk across 70 miles of ice from the shores of Antarctica (where they usually live since they need to be near water so they can dive into the water and catch the fish and krill they survive by eating), where they set up what amounts to a giant cruise bar for penguins. A male penguin and a female penguin hook up, they have sex, and the female lays an egg which for some evolutionary reason I can’t fathom she then has to shove into the body cavity of the male, where it spends about four months before the male hatches it (so emperor penguins are one species in which it’s the males that give birth!) while the females walk back the 70 miles to their original home by the sea (which is now a few miles more distant because there’s more of an ice cover over the salt water)a and eat enough fish not only for themselves but also to take back to the Penguin Cruise Bar and feed it to their newborn young.
March of the Penguins, made by a French crew in Terre Adélie (part of the section of Antarctica administratively assigned to France) and directed by Luc Jacquet, was a surprise hit at the time — in the U.S. it grossed over $77 million, more than any of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture that year — though I bypassed it, I suspect because I’d been bored by a previous French-made documentary about wild birds, Winged Migration. I’d seen Winged Migration at a press screening and reviewed it for Zenger’s Newsmagazine, and I’d written, “[I]t’s just way too much of a good thing. There are shots here of almost unearthly beauty, but, especially in the second half, every flock of winged migrators looks an awful lot like every other flock of winged migrators[1] and only the printed subtitles and the heavily French-accented narration (credited to filmmaker [Jacques] Perrin in the press kit but to someone else on screen) tell us where we are and what sorts of birds we’re watching.” I liked March of the Penguins considerably better than Winged Migration, and I suspect it was because it dealt with only one species of bird and told a continuous story about one particularly dramatic phase of its lifestyle. It did have some of the flaws of “pop” nature documentaries, including the attempt through the writing and editing to create artificial “heroes” and “villains” in nature — in this case the primary villains are seals, seagulls and ducks, who prey on penguins and particularly try to eat the newborn ones who can’t really fight back — and the cutesy-poo narration, delivered in his best éminence noir tones by Morgan Freeman and written by Jordan Roberts. I have a feeling I’d have liked the original French version even less, since according to imdb.com it not only had a third-person human narrator but actually supplied dialogue for the penguins.
I also thought that, as amazing as the shots of the penguins walking across Antarctica to their spawning grounds were (even though I couldn’t help but joke about the sheer amount of trouble and effort penguins have to go through just to get laid!), the true highlights of the film in terms of sheer beauty were the shots of penguins swimming under water and catching and eating the fish they need to survive. (But then, as Charles pointed out to me, the film was not called Swim of the Penguins.) Also on the DVD were a couple of extras about its making, which we bypassed, and two bonus items we did watch: the original theatrical trailer and a 1949 Bugs Bunny short called Eight-Ball Hare in which Bugs has to transport a lost carnival penguin to the South Pole — there were three appearances by a caricature of Humphrey Bogart as he looked in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, appealing to Bugs with his line from the early part of that film, “Can’t you help out a fellow American who’s down on his luck?” One quirky — and rather jarring — aspect of March of the Penguins was that its opening and closing credits were printed in the same type face as the main credits for the various Law and Order TV shows; another is that there was actually a sequel made in 2017, while shortly after the original was released comedian Stewart Lee came up with a spoof called Farce of the Penguins (which I suspect was just the original March of the Penguins with a new soundtrack and comedy narration dubbed in à la What’s Up, Tiger Lily?). I was also amused that the credited production companies were National Geographic Films, Bonne Pioche (the word “pioche” is French for a pickaxe or a pile of cards, neither of which seems applicable to this film) and something called Wild Bunch — which made me wonder if the film was going to end with some Old West gunmen slaughtering the penguins in slow motion.
I screened Charles the DVD of the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins. This was a documentary about the elaborate process the emperor penguins of Antarctica have to go through to reproduce — they have to walk across 70 miles of ice from the shores of Antarctica (where they usually live since they need to be near water so they can dive into the water and catch the fish and krill they survive by eating), where they set up what amounts to a giant cruise bar for penguins. A male penguin and a female penguin hook up, they have sex, and the female lays an egg which for some evolutionary reason I can’t fathom she then has to shove into the body cavity of the male, where it spends about four months before the male hatches it (so emperor penguins are one species in which it’s the males that give birth!) while the females walk back the 70 miles to their original home by the sea (which is now a few miles more distant because there’s more of an ice cover over the salt water)a and eat enough fish not only for themselves but also to take back to the Penguin Cruise Bar and feed it to their newborn young.
March of the Penguins, made by a French crew in Terre Adélie (part of the section of Antarctica administratively assigned to France) and directed by Luc Jacquet, was a surprise hit at the time — in the U.S. it grossed over $77 million, more than any of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture that year — though I bypassed it, I suspect because I’d been bored by a previous French-made documentary about wild birds, Winged Migration. I’d seen Winged Migration at a press screening and reviewed it for Zenger’s Newsmagazine, and I’d written, “[I]t’s just way too much of a good thing. There are shots here of almost unearthly beauty, but, especially in the second half, every flock of winged migrators looks an awful lot like every other flock of winged migrators[1] and only the printed subtitles and the heavily French-accented narration (credited to filmmaker [Jacques] Perrin in the press kit but to someone else on screen) tell us where we are and what sorts of birds we’re watching.” I liked March of the Penguins considerably better than Winged Migration, and I suspect it was because it dealt with only one species of bird and told a continuous story about one particularly dramatic phase of its lifestyle. It did have some of the flaws of “pop” nature documentaries, including the attempt through the writing and editing to create artificial “heroes” and “villains” in nature — in this case the primary villains are seals, seagulls and ducks, who prey on penguins and particularly try to eat the newborn ones who can’t really fight back — and the cutesy-poo narration, delivered in his best éminence noir tones by Morgan Freeman and written by Jordan Roberts. I have a feeling I’d have liked the original French version even less, since according to imdb.com it not only had a third-person human narrator but actually supplied dialogue for the penguins.
I also thought that, as amazing as the shots of the penguins walking across Antarctica to their spawning grounds were (even though I couldn’t help but joke about the sheer amount of trouble and effort penguins have to go through just to get laid!), the true highlights of the film in terms of sheer beauty were the shots of penguins swimming under water and catching and eating the fish they need to survive. (But then, as Charles pointed out to me, the film was not called Swim of the Penguins.) Also on the DVD were a couple of extras about its making, which we bypassed, and two bonus items we did watch: the original theatrical trailer and a 1949 Bugs Bunny short called Eight-Ball Hare in which Bugs has to transport a lost carnival penguin to the South Pole — there were three appearances by a caricature of Humphrey Bogart as he looked in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, appealing to Bugs with his line from the early part of that film, “Can’t you help out a fellow American who’s down on his luck?” One quirky — and rather jarring — aspect of March of the Penguins was that its opening and closing credits were printed in the same type face as the main credits for the various Law and Order TV shows; another is that there was actually a sequel made in 2017, while shortly after the original was released comedian Stewart Lee came up with a spoof called Farce of the Penguins (which I suspect was just the original March of the Penguins with a new soundtrack and comedy narration dubbed in à la What’s Up, Tiger Lily?). I was also amused that the credited production companies were National Geographic Films, Bonne Pioche (the word “pioche” is French for a pickaxe or a pile of cards, neither of which seems applicable to this film) and something called Wild Bunch — which made me wonder if the film was going to end with some Old West gunmen slaughtering the penguins in slow motion.
[1] — A line I actually ripped off from Allan Sherman’s
liner notes to his album with the Boston “Pops” Orchestra: “The end of every
symphony sounds like the end of every other symphony, and goes on forever,
which is more time than I like to spend in a concert hall.”
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