The Wrong Cheerleader Coach (Lifetime Pictures, Hybrid, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime movie about cheerleaders was called The Wrong Cheerleader Coach -- though I inevitably joked about extending the title to incorporate more Lifetime formulae and calling it The Wrong Cheerleader Coach She Met Online at 17. It was a quirky sort of follow-up to The Wrong Cheerleader, down to an inventive reworking of the line Vivica A. Fox, who was in both movies (and whom I regard as a sort of successor to Hattie McDaniel, even though she’s playing an authority figure instead of a maid, because she has McDaniel’s old stereotyped role of the sensible Black woman who tries to talk the white characters out of their stupidities), said at the end of the earlier film. The Wrong Cheerleader Coach was produced by Lifetime Pictures (they’ve become, at least on their credits, a producing studio instead of just a cable outlet) in association with the Canadian company Hybrid, and Vivica A. Fox plays the right cheerleader coach, Coach Burke (if she has a first name we never see it, which reminds me of Ralph Berton’s comment that growing up in the 1920’s he wasn’t aware until decades later that teachers even had first names), who has just hired a new assistant coach, Devan Walters (Johanna Liauw), fresh out of junior college.

Devan, of course, turns out to be the wrong cheerleader coach referred to in the title, and what’s “wrong” about her is that ever since her mom left her dad while she was still a child and left her dad to raise her as a single parent, Devan has developed a “thing” for older men, particularly older men who are also raising teenage girls as a single parent. The single dad she goes after in this movie is John Thompson, played by former child actor and teen heartthrob Corin Nemec -- he used to go by “Corky Nemec” until he tweaked the nickname to make it sound more mature as he got older (his birth name was “Joseph Charles Nemec IV”) -- and like some of the other 1980’s heartthrobs Lifetime has dug up lately, including Eric Roberts and Jason Priestley, he’s weathered the years well enough that he’s still credible as a man who can attract a chiclet like Devan. John is an architect who’s just been reassigned from Chicago to wherever (the locale of this movie is unspecified but I was assuming it was a major city in the Pacific Northwest, where a lot of Lifetime movies are set so they can be shot just across the Canadian border in Vancouver) to oversee a major construction project his firm has designed.

This has meant uprooting Hannah Thompson (Madi Burton), his daughter, whom he’s been raising as a single parent since the death of Hannah’s mom from cancer a year before. Hannah is upset that her dad uprooted her from her familiar surroundings and social circle just as she was about to start her senior year in high school and was hoping to be the star of her old school’s cheerleading squad. Now she’s forced to attend Lincoln High School and try out for the “Eagles” cheer team, which intimidates her because of Coach Burke’s fearsome reputation. Hannah isn’t totally the stereotypical “New Girl in School” because she makes friends almost immediately; the Lincoln football team’s quarterback, Ben Fairmont (Duke Van Patten, grandson of Dick Van Patten and son of Vincent Van Patten -- I remember wondering when Vincent first emerged on the scene how someone whose dad always looked to me like someone had baked him out of Wonder Bread could have sired a hunky son, and if anything Duke is even hotter than his dad -- it’s true that he was born in 1993 and therefore is about a decade too old to be playing a high school student in a 2020 movie, but who cares? Frankly, I’d rather watch someone this ripped than the twerpy twink casting directors Dean E. Frank and Donald Paul Pemrick would have picked if they’d been looking for someone more age-appropriate), just happens to be her next-door neighbor and offers her a ride to school her first day.

She also makes a friend on the cheerleading squad, Claire (Mea Wilkerson), who because she’s Black seems like writers Adam Rockoff, Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan (only Rockoff is credited on imdb.com but the others are listed on the film’s credits and they’re the usual team Hybrid goes to for their “original” stories) are setting her up to be the Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Catches On to the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Tell Anyone -- but Lifetime has actually been moving away from that cliche in the last two years or so and Claire is blessedly still alive at the end of the film. The titular wrong cheerleading coach, Devan Walters, immediately sets her sights on Hannah’s dad John once she lays her eyes on him, though she has competition from Melissa Ross (Bailey Kai), an assistant to the construction supervisor on the big project John is supposed to be supervising, whom he meets professionally but starts dating because they share an interest in fine cuisine and Melissa is interested in showing him the best restaurants in a city he doesn’t know.

That doesn’t stop Devan from hanging out outside the Thompsons’ home in the obligatory (for a Lifetime villain of either mainstream gender) dark hoodie and at one point even stalking a restaurant where John and Melissa are having one of their foodie dates -- for a moment I thought Devan was going to ambush Melissa in the women’s rest room and beat the shit out of her, but she didn’t (at least Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Rockoff showed that much restraint!). Instead Devan comes over unannounced and uninvited to the Thompsons’ one night and brings a bunch of takeout Chinese food in the obligatory folded cardboard containers --- she says she cooked it all herself, but that’s a little hard to believe -- and John Thompson tells her off and says he’s absolutely not interested in her “that way,” as grateful as he is for the private coaching sessions (which he paid for) Devan gave Hannah as she was auditioning for the cheer squad.

Against his daughter’s protestations, once Devan turns violently against Hannah and chews her out as incompetent in front of the cheer squad and Coach Burke, John goes to Coach Burke and tells her about his situation with Devan. Coach Burke gives Devan a major dressing-down and Devan responds by trying to eliminate the competition, running Melissa down with her car in a big parking lot. Melissa survives but is laid up in the hospital with a broken leg -- and John is solicitous enough he spends all the time he can spare visiting her and helping with her care. Hannah gets a lead on a former junior college cheerleading coach, Coach Hughes (Tara Reid), who remembers Devan as someone who set her sights on another older man who was raising his cheerleader daughter as a single father, only the man died under “mysterious” circumstances.

They’re not so mysterious to us because we’ve already seen Devan commit murder: she worked out at a gym where she had a personal trainer, Jack (Jensen Atwood, a very hot Black actor who was definitely giving Duke Van Patten a run for his money in the looks department -- especially when we saw him shirtless during one of his own workout session and we got a great look at his amazing pecs), who was continually making passes at her. I know whom I would have chosen if the alternatives were Jensen Atwood and the current Corin Nemec, but Devan protests that she’s not interested in anyone so close to her own age and at one point she eliminates him by sneaking up behind him with a dumbbell and hitting him over the head with it. (This is yet another murder in a Lifetime movie which not only never gets solved but seemingly never even gets investigated: one would think Jack’s body would be discovered sometime and the cops would take the call and find out his connection to Devan, but instead he just disappears and nobody seems either to know or care that he’s missing.)

Eventually Hannah is surprised at her home by Devan, who holds a knife to her throat while she’s in Hannah’s house and John is out. Hannah tries to talk Devan into sparing her life by saying she always wanted Devan as a stepmom, and Ben (ya remember Ben? Though he did take Hannah on the trip to see Coach Hughes, for the most part he has far less of an important role in solving the mystery than most Lifetime teen-girl-movie boyfriends) tries to intervene. Devan tells Ben she’s the one with the knife and therefore he has nothing to say about the situation, but just then the deus ex machina arrives in the person of Coach Burke, who knocks out Devan with a hockey stick and says, “I hired the wrong cheerleader coach” -- a clever but predictable variant on her exit line in the previous Lifetime movie The Wrong Cheerleader, “You messed with the wrong cheerleader.”

There’s a bizarre postlude introduced by a title reading, “One Year Later,” only it’s not at all what we expected: instead of Hannah doing cheer as part of her first year in college and John and Melissa happily paired off at long last, apparently they broke up because the new woman in John’s life is Hannah’s new cheerleading coach, and as John thanks her for all the help she’s been to Hannah she makes an enigmatic remark along the lines of, “I don’t think I ever want to leave.” It’s the sort of here-we-go-again open-ended ending Lifetime has been annoying us with lately (though usually it’s one in which the villain has escaped -- as Devan indeed did at the end of this one -- and is seen pulling the same scheme on another unsuspecting victim in another town) instead of the return-to-normalcy ending we were expecting and hoping for.

The Wrong Cheerleader Coach was an O.K. Lifetime movie, competently directed by David DeCoteau (who, like the writers, s a name we’re used to seeing on Lifetime-Hybrid productions) and with yet another good villainess performance by Johanna Lieuw that helps make up for the non-performance by Madi Burton as Hannah, the girl we’re supposed to like. Burton isn’t especially attractive -- I suspect any straight guys in the audience got far more of a “charge” from Johanna Lieuw -- and she barely acts at all; like Jerni Stewart in Cheerleader Abduction, Burton is just a drip, neither competent nor flamboyantly awful but just there, able to do little more than pout in big scenes like the one in which Devan tells Hannah off in cheerleading practice just because Hannah’s dad has rejected her. The two people who’d reviewed this movie so far for imdb.com have both complained about how often Corin Nemec took off his glasses and then put them on again, but I could regard that as the vanity of a middle-aged man whose eyesight has deteriorated enough he needs glasses but his male ego is still resisting them. But The Wrong Cheerleader Coach has more serious problems than the state of Corin Nemec’s eyes!

The Way I See It (Universal/Comcast, Focus Features, MS-NBC Films, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 7 p.m. MS-NBC ran a documentary feature called The Way I See It about Pete Souza, who was on Ronald Reagain’s official staff of White House photographers during the last two years of the Reagan Presidency and then went to work for the Chicago Tribune newspaper. In 2005 he volunteered to follow the newly elected U.S. Senator Barack Obama around in Chicago and then in Washington, D.C. as he took office. He was only supposed to do this for a year, but Souza managed to get himself assigned to the Tribune’s “Obama detail” for the next four years. When Obama became President after the 2008 election (back when we still could have confidence in the electoral process and the willingness of Presidents to leave office when the Constitution and the U.S. voters told them they had to) he asked Souza to be his official White House photographer, and Souza stayed in that role for the entire two terms of Obama’s Presidency.

After 2017 -- when he shot pictures of Obama and Donald Trump meeting in the White House and Obama working sincerely to brief Trump and make the succession as easy as possible -- Souza became a nature photographer (there’s an interesting glimpse of him pointing his camera straight down and shooting a bush) and also created two books from his photos of the Obama administration. One was a straightforward coffee-table book called Obama presenting his pictures of the 44th President without political commentary. The other was inspired by an Instagram account Souza created, ironically juxtaposing his Obama pics with snippy commentaries of his own comparing the immediate past president with the current one (including one of Obama signing an honorary “wall of freedom” to pay tribute to civil-rights heroes with Souza’s caption, which was something like, “Obama’s idea of a wall”). When he first started posting these entries on Instagram a friend told him he was “dropping shade” on Trump, a phrase he’d never heard before, but he embraced it enough that he put together a book of his Instagram posts and called it Shade.

The documentary wasn’t as blatantly anti-Trump as Souza’s social-media posts and the book he created from them, but it certainly got the message across, albeit in a veiled way. The most blatant anti-Trump commentary was from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who listed five qualities she thought a successful President needed, among them empathy, compassion and a willingness to recruit advisers with different points of view so he gets a wide range of options when he (or someday, Goddess willing, she!) needs to make a major decision. She didn’t have to say the name “Trump” or even refer to the current President without using his name to make her point: a man who regards empathy and compassion for others as signs of weakness instead of strength, and who demands sycophantic “loyalty” from all his associates so they always tell him how great he is and never even approach questioning him (and who has systematically purged his staff of everyone who might actually tell him something he needs to hear that doesn’t fit his preconceived notions -- one of Kearns Goodwin’s previous books is called Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet and how Lincoln, like Franklin Roosevelt later, deliberately surrounded himself with people who disagreed with him, and each other, to make sure he got the best advice possible) is a man who should not be President of the United States.

At the same time people coming to this movie from the current campaign, in which Obama’s vice-president, Joe Biden, is Trump’s major-party opponent and is selling his closeness to Obama and his involvement in Obama’s decision-making as major reasons people should vote for him, are going to be surprised at how few photos of Obama and his top advisers in which Biden actually appears. We get a few Where’s Waldo? glimpses of him off to the side at one meeting or another, but mostly he’s absent from the rooms where Obama’s big decisions were made. This isn’t that different from the usual role of a vice-president, but it doesn’t exactly support Biden’s major selling point as a candidate who as President will restore the “normalcy” (Warren G. Harding’s word from 1920, which began as a malapropism -- the word he meant was “normality” -- but has been used so long and by so many people, including Joe Biden himself this year, it has essentially become a legitimate part of American English) of the Obama years and -- as I’ve joked should be his campaign slogan -- “Make America Boring Again.”

Souza has become an unlikely social-media star in the post-Obama years -- the show includes footage of his book signings (back when authors could still do book signings!) and his interviews (in some of which he’s wearing a T-shirt promoting the modern-day country singer Brandi Carlile -- which had me wonder if he’s done any photographic work for her) along with some fascinating anecdotes from the Obama years. The film juxtaposed Souza’s long-term relationship with his partner Patti Lease, whom he’d lived with for nearly two decades before getting married, with Obama’s late-in-his-term decision to endorse marriage equality for same-sex couples. Souza says Obama frequently asked Souza why he and Patti had never got married -- “he thinks everyone should be married,” Souza said of Obama, and that clearly extended to the young Gay man on the White House staff whom Obama felt for because he couldn’t marry his long-time partner. There was a lot of sadness in the film’s coverage of the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 majority, struck down the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996 (which declared the federal government would never recognize same-sex couples as married even if their states had allowed them to do so) and declared under the U.S. Constitution and specifically the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that laws banning same-sex couples from marrying were unconstitutional.

The sadness is that decision is almost certain to be overruled and reversed once Amy Coney Barrett takes her seat on the Supreme Court (which, barring four Republican U.S., Senators having road-to-Damascus moments in the next few days, is a virtual certainty), since two Right-wing justices Trump did not appoint, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have already filed documents saying the Obergefell decision was a “mistake” and needs to be overturned as soon as possible. A ruling in that direction won’t do much to Charles and I -- about the only change would be that we could no longer file a joint Federal tax return -- but it’s going to create huge amounts of turmoil for any Gay or Lesbian couples who got married after 2015. (Charles and I are grandfathered in because we married during 2008, in the five-month “window” between the California Supreme Court decision invalidating the laws against same-sex marriage on state constitutional grounds and the passage of Proposition 8, which re-imposed the state ban -- and quite frankly it’s unclear whether a U.S. Supreme Court reversal of Obergefell would restore Proposition 8 to effectiveness or not, since it was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court on a legal technicality rather than reversed as part of Obergefell.)

The Way I See It barely mentions Ronald Reagan and Souza’s work for him in the later stages of his presidency, though it has a marvelous sequence showing Souza shooting a video of them at the Reagan Ranch either just before or just after Ronald Reagan left office, and it’s amusing to watch the former Warner Bros. contract player essentially take over the direction of the clip. What there is of Reagan here seems designed by the filmmakers (one of whom, director Dawn Porter, was interviewed along with a couple of other guests on MS-NBC after the film was over) to say that Trump is an outlier even among other Right-wing Republican Presidents, and that you can have terrible politics (at least from Charles’ and my point of view) and still not be a terrible human being.

The Time of Your Life (William Cagney Productions, United Artists, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Way I See It I looked for something to watch in the next couple of hours and found it in The Time of Your Life, which I had out as part of the American Movie Classics boxed set of four films with James Cagney that contained films from the two major interregna between his long-standing association with Warner Bros.: the 1936-37 period in which he was able to break his Warners contract legally and signed with a promising indie called Grand National after the other major studios refused to risk Jack Warner’s wrath by signing him (Warners eventually won his contract back on appeal and so after his two Grand National films, Great Guy and Something to Sing About, he returned to the Warners fold for Angels with Dirty Faces, ironically a project Grand National had developed for him) and again between 1943 and 1948. Cagney’s Warners contract had officially ended with Yankee Doodle Dandy, a biopic of legendary Broadway star and playwright George M. Cohan (who managed the interesting feat of acting in two live Broadway plays simultaneously: the theatres were next door to each other and, since Cohan had written both plays, he timed them so his character would be off-stage in one when he was on-stage in the other) that gave Cagney a rare opportunity to perform as the song-and-dance man he always said he was at heart (in his autobiography he said that his biggest career regret was he got to do so few musicals), won him an Academy Award and made Warner Bros. a ton of money.

Cagney decided to form his own production company, made his brother William Cagney the CEO, and signed a releasing deal with United Artists -- though he occasionally free-lanced for other studios, including the quite good semidocumentary World War II spy drama 13 Rue Madeleine for 20th Century-Fox. For what turned out to be the last Cagney Brothers production, the Cagneys selected William Saroyan’s play The Time of Your Life, which had won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Critics’ Circle award (the Tony Awards didn’t yet exist) and was obviously a “prestige” piece of work. It’s about a lowlife bar on the San Francisco waterfront called Nick’s Place, after its owner -- who surprisingly is not played by Cagney but by a relatively restrained William Bendix. (Bendix was a first-rate character actor, but unfortunately what was potentially his greatest performance -- in Raymond Chandler’s 1946 script The Blue Dahlia, as Buzz, the World War II navy veteran who had been driven homicidally crazy by the stresses of combat -- was disemboweled by the U.S. Navy. They said that if Paramount went ahead with Chandler’s original ending, with Bendix’s character having killed Alan Ladd’s faithless wife in an attack of PTSD, the Navy would never again cooperate with any Paramount film -- so the studio told Chandler to rewrite the ending so another character was the killer, and Chandler responded with one of the lamest and least believable pieces of writing of his whole career.)

Cagney plays Joe, a philosophical bar “regular” who seems to have some money even though he doesn’t have a job or any discernible source of income and who seems to get his kicks tormenting the other patrons in general and one specific patron in particular, Tom (played by Cagney’s fellow Warners refugee Wayne Morris), whom he sends on ridiculous errands like going to the Emporium department store (a fabled San Francisco landmark for decades) and buying toys, and later challenging him to a gum-chewing contest to see which one can get the most amount of stuff in his mouth at once. The bar is filled with other eccentric “regulars,” including aspiring tap-dancer Harry (Paul Draper, who’s quite good even though I wonder how Cagney felt about not being able to dance himself even in a movie he and his brother were co-producing!); Willie (Richard Erdman), who’s constantly playing the bar’s pinball machine until he finally hits a jackpot (remember that in this era pinball machines were a form of gambling, like slot machines, and many of the noir pulp-magazine stories revolved around fights between different factions of organized crime to control them; later pinball machines carried a warning, “For Amusement Only,” to let the cops know they were not gambling devices); Wesley (Reginald Beane), a Black pianist who wanders into the action, gets a job as Nick’s piano player and ends up as Harry’s accompanist; a well-to-do middle-aged couple who end up at Nick’s on a “slumming” trip; Dudley Raoul Bostwick (Jimmy Lydon, who’d previously starred in a series called “The Aldrich Family” for Paramount that was essentially a knockoff of the Hardy Family movies at MGM -- so Lydon was basically their Mickey Rooney), who spends much of the movie trying to get his would-be girlfriend Eloise on the phone even though she’s told her parents she doesn’t want to speak to him; a middle-aged woman whom Dudley calls by mistake when he gets Eloise’s number wrong and whom he invites to the bar only to reject her when he sees how old she is (a scene that seemed gratuitously cruel to me); and an old cowboy -- or at least that’s what he pretends to be -- named Murphy (James Barton) who either claims to be or is genuinely deluded enough to believe he’s Kit Carson.

Ironically, by far the best performance in this movie is delivered by someone named Cagney, but who isn’t the star; she’s James and William Cagney’s sister Jeanne, and she plays Kitty Duval, an edgy burned-out woman who claims to have been a star in burlesque. Her real name is Katerina Koronovsky and she’s from Chicago, where she served a two-year sentence for a crime screenwriter Nathaniel Greene had to left unspecified due to the Production Code but which is obviously prostitution. (I haven’t read Saroyan’s original play, so I don’t know whether he was more specific about Kitty’s crime than Greene could be under the Code,) She’s attracted the unwelcome attentions of Freddy Blick (Tom Powers), a professional stool pigeon who hangs around San Francisco’s sleazier bars and looks for people in trouble with the law, apparently so he can make a living turning them in and collecting the rewards on them -- though since she served her sentence it’s unclear just what he could do to her. Joe has been doing his best to redeem her, including putting her up in a classy hotel and trying to pair her with Tom -- for whom Joe also lines up a job as a long-haul truck driver between San Francisco and San Diego even though Tom doesn’t even have a driver’s license. His hope is that Tom can earn enough driving that he and Kitty can get married and settle in San Diego, where (presumably) no one knows about their past.

In the end Nick the bar owner steps out to go for a walk, leaving Tom to run the bar (given that this film is supposed to be taking place on the waterfront during a longshoremen’s strike, I expected Nick to come back beaten up by goons of one side or the other, but he doesn’t), and during that time Murphy the cowboy wanna-be takes a shot at Blick and thinks he’s killed him. Nick sees Blick unconscious and presumably dead, and puts his head in his hands and worries for the future of his license now that someone has been killed in his club -- only Blick isn’t really dead, Murphy’s shot missed and he was only knocked out by a left-handed punch from Joe: apparently the Cagney brothers realized that with five minutes of the movie left to go they’d have to put in a fistfight just to let their audiences know that despite their story’s Broadway pedigree it was still a James Cagney vehicle. Tom and Kitty pair off and leave, and the last shot for some reason is of Nick tearing up the sign that had adorned the entrance at the beginning that Nick’s was a place where you could “come in and be yourself.” (Everybody comes to Nick’s.)

I wouldn’t go so far as to call The Time of Your Life what Dwight Macdonald called “the Bad Good Movie” -- a film made with aspirations to greatness but whose basic material wasn’t nearly as strong as the filmmakers thought it was and which ended up as too pretentious for its own good -- but it’s close, and I think the fault is mostly William Saroyan’s. He was a “name” writer with a lot of successes under his belt both in novels and on the stage, but in this play I think he was trying way too hard to be Eugene O’Neill and was falling miserably short of his model. (I couldn’t help but wish through long stretches of this movie that the Cagney brothers had got the rights to O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh instead.) Aside from Kitty -- who’s a pretty stereotyped character herself but is brought to vivid, unforgettable life by Jeanne Cagney’s performance (which should have broken her career wide open; in 1948 the film noir cycle was at its height and judging from her work here, she’d have been excellent as hard-bitten noir women, but I guess she never got casting directors to take her seriously out from under the shadow of her superstar brother) -- the people in this movie are less flesh-and-blood human beings and more like schticks from Saroyan’s cliche mill.

It also doesn’t help that the second male lead is cast with someone as weak as Wayne Morris -- imagine John Garfield in his role giving the character some real flesh and sinew instead of a little milquetoast on whom Saroyan and Greene tried to pile some angst -- and for something that was clearly a prestige production the Cagneys selected an oddly weak director, H. C. Potter. It needed someone like William Wellman or William Wyler who could have built tension in a movie set almost exclusively in one locale (about the only time we get out of that damned bar is for a scene in which Tom goes to the home of a bookmaker to place a bet on a race -- and the people are watching the race on TV, which makes this one of the first movies to show a regular commercial television set in action; this was just before the major studios decided TV was the enemy and therefore they wouldn’t show televisions in movies even as a greater proportion of American homes had them; still later, of course, the studios kept themselves in business by producing series shows for TV!). The Time of Your Life is an engaging movie but far from a great one, and it’s ironic that a year after he made this expectation-bending prestige film for his own company, Cagney closed it, went back to Warners and got cast in familiar territory as a psycho gangster in White Heat -- which turned out to be one of his best-remembered and most popular films.

Live at the Belly Up: Beats Antique (Belly Up Tavern, KPBS-TV, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that Charles and I watched an episode of Live at the Belly Up on KPBS -- the Belly Up Tavern being a long-established live-music venue in Solana Beach (though I have no idea how they’re weathering the storms of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic) that already existed when I moved to San Diego in 1980, though due to my usual transportation issues (I don’t drive) I’ve never actually been to, so I’m grateful to KPBS for filming shows there and airing them as a regular series. (The one last night was copyrighted 2018.) The act on last night’s show was Beats Antique, a bizarrely eclectic ensemble of three or more musicians and three female dancers -- though the Wikipedia page on them, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_Antique, lists only three permanent members: multi-instrumentalist David Satori, drummer Tommy “Sidecar” Cappel (who was the spokesperson for them on the brief interview segments between some of the songs) and dancer Zoe Jakes. (The Wikipedia page says Satori and Jakes began “dating” in 2007, the year Beats Antique was formed, but does not say whether or not they are still an off-stage couple.)

Beats Antique was formed under the sponsorship of Miles Copeland, brother of former Police drummer Stewart Copeland, apparently at first just to provide recorded accompaniments for Jakes’ dances. But they soon became a live performance act as well, drawing from the San Francisco Bay Area tradition of street festivals (Beats Antique are based in the East Bay city of Oakland, also the home town of Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris) as well as Satori’s experience playing with street bands in Nigeria and other West African countries and Jakes’ training as a belly dancer. There were actually three musicians and three dancers in Beats Antique’s Belly Up performance -- drummer Cappel, a musician who played electric banjo (though it was a flat-bodied instrument and didn’t sound all that different from an electric guitar) and doubled on electric violin, and a reed player who doubled on clarinet (though he played it so high that at first it sounded like an oboe) and baritone saxophone -- though his sax sounded less like a jazz musician’s and more like Dana Colley, who gave a unique sonic texture to the early 1990’s band Morphine.

The most obvious influence on the music of Beats Antique was Middle Eastern, but both their music and their highly visual performance-art act drew extensively on other sources as well. Cappel insisted in his interviews that the band combined live performance and D.J. culture -- though rather than actually mixing live they rely on carefully produced studio recordings (Beats Antique has released no fewer than 11 albums, all on Miles Copeland’s CIA Records label -- so called, by the way, because Miles and Stewart Copeland’s father was actually a major officer in the Central Intelligence Agency) from which they accompany themselves in live performance, deleting from the recordings the instruments they’re going to play live. In previous Live at the Belly Up shows I’ve often counted the number of separate songs the band performs in their allotted 55 minutes to indicate how improvisational they are -- usually the fewer songs, the freer the band’s performance -- but that metric definitely does not apply to Beats Antique. The band ostensibly performed 13 songs on this show -- “I Got,” “Killer Bee,” “Semblance,” “Oriental Uno,” “Three Sisters,” “Dope Crunk,” “Vapor Star,” “Vendetta,” “Battle,” “Daze,” “Crush,” “Bombay Beats,” and “Egyptic” -- but a lot of them blended into each other. The way the band blends recorded and live performances allows them to present guest stars they’ve recorded with in other cities and countries, like vocalist Tatiana Karakova in Ukraine and sarod player (the sarod is a less jangly cousin of the sitar) Alam Khan from India, even though they’re not present.

Beats Antique is a unique group that scores with the sheer theatricality of their presentation -- the musicians, the dancers, the light show (my husband Charles said they were one of the few groups that actually benefited from a light show instead of putting one on just because audiences expect one). Mostly Zoe and her fellow dancers wore more or less traditional belly-dancing costumes (which no doubt got a charge from the straight guys in the audience!), but there were other elements, especially when Zoe wore one of those harnesses that carries a bass drum so it can be used in a marching band and on one number, “Killer Bee,” Zoe and the two other dancers wielded pom-poms and looked so much like a spaced-out version of a cheerleader squad I joked, “Now we know where all those killer cheerleaders from Lifetime ended up!” About the only thing I would fault Beats Antique for is that, despite the wide variety of instruments they use and sounds they achieve with them, the songs are still mostly in mid-tempi and started to blend together after a while. A few softer, subtler tracks that would have allowed Zoe and the other dancers to do more balletic moves would have been a nice change of pace. But still this was a really fun group, well worth seeing and a delightful change from the norms of small-club musical performance!

Cheerleader Abduction (Lifetime Pictures, Robbins Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime ran a movie that was sort of an outlier in their “Fear the Cheer” series because, while it was called Cheerleader Abduction, the fact that the teenage heroine was a cheerleader was pretty incidental to the plot and we didn’t get to see many glimpses of scantily clad teenage girls doing hot dance routines (the main attraction of cheerleader movies on Lifetime -- as I’ve pointed out before, the words “cheerleader” and “sorority” are buzzwords Lifetime uses in their periodic attempts to get straight men to watch their channel). From the previews I had expected Cheerleader Abduction to be a sort of modern-dress version of The Great Lie (the 1941 Warner Bros. tearjerker in which Bette Davis and Mary Astor are romantic rivals for George Brent: Astor gets Brent to marry her but he almost immediately has the marriage annulled so he can marry Davis -- only in the meantime Astor got pregnant with Brent’s child and so she and Davis, who naturally can’t stand each other, have to live together in a desert hideaway for several months until the baby is born so they can pass it off as Davis’s; unlike other women who worked with Bette Davis, Mary Astor had nothing but good to say about the experience, claiming that Davis had asked the director to do retakes to favor Astor and get a stronger performance out of her, with the result that Astor won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award), but instead it turned out to be the old chestnut about the teenage girl who gets pregnant (by a boy she tricked with at a party and otherwise can’t stand -- yes, once again we have what David O. Selznick famously ridiculed as “infallible pregnancies at a single contact”) and gets recruited by a sinister “pregnancy counselor” who’s really running an underground adoption agency trafficking in black-market babies.

Alas, this is one Lifetime movie (produced by Lifetime Pictures in association with Robbins Entertainment and MarVista Entertainment) that has somehow escaped the notice of imdb.com, and the online source I was able to find gives only two actors’ names associated with their characters: Jerni Stewart as the heroine (sort of), Olivia Patton, and Kristen Harris as her mom Trish Patton. The family also includes a husband, Douglas -- who’s sort of a milquetoast character who works from home as a designer while Trish is mayor of the small town of Danforth, Michigan where the story takes place and she’s running in a Democratic primary for governor. (Judging from the experience of the current Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who’s been savagely attacked by President Trump over her aggressive response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and was the subject of an alleged plot by 13 white supremacists to kidnap her, give her a rump “trial” and possibly kill her, I wanted to take Trish aside and warn her that being a Democratic woman governor of Michigan isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.) There’s also one other kid in the Patton family, Olivia’s younger brother Aiden.

The gimmick is that almost as soon as Olivia finds out she’s pregnant and the guy who made her that way, Blake, rudely puts her off and basically says, “Not my problem,” she runs into the villain of the piece, Pamela Fairlane. I wish I knew the name of the actress playing this part because she’s the best performer in the movie; she’s middle-aged, rather dumpy-looking and butch enough with her short haircut that the friend with whom I was watching this thought she was supposed to be playing a Lesbian. (Actually it seems these days as if a lot of women are adopting the androgynous look, cutting their hair short and wearing bras that mash their tits down instead of showing them off -- and with so many people wearing face masks during the pandemic and thereby concealing whether or not they have facial hair, it’s getting harder to tell men and women apart when you see them on the street. The Black cheerleader coach in this movie is tall, slender, has her hair cut very short and has so little in the breast department that at first I wondered if she was a guy.) Whoever the actress playing Pamela is, she turns in a remarkable performance, managing to suggest the character’s ability to pose as sweetness and light as well as the evil underneath.

That’s a good thing because, while Kristen Harris turns in a performance of power and authority as the concerned mother torn between advancing her political career and protecting her daughter, Jerni Stewart is a total drip. She’s unable to bring any reality to the character’s conflicts and she goes through the whole movie with a fixed expression of mild annoyance at all the issues Jessica Landry’s script throws at her, from getting morning sickness while riding with the family in their car to attempting to register horror when she realizes that Pamela has essentially kidnapped her to grab and sell her baby. Michelle Ouillet is the director, and she turns in a decent job given the limitations of both the script and her leading actress -- the suspense as Pamela takes Olivia to a seedy motel to have her kjd (with the assistance of a barely competent doctor who walks out in the middle of the procedure, saying that Pamela isn’t paying him enough to risk losing his medical license over this) and Trish blows off an all-important TV candidates’ debate to give chase and rescue her daughter is genuinely exciting and convincing -- but for the most part Cheerleader Abduction is a pretty standard Lifetime movie with little to recommend it aside from a nice performance from the villain and good work from Kristen Harris.

I found the ending pretty preposterous: it takes place seven months after the main action and tells us that, despite blowing off the big TV primary debate to rescue her daughter, Trish won not only the primary but the general election for governor (so she can get nasty tweets from President Trump and death threats from white supremacists!) despite blowing off the debate -- it would have worked better dramatically if Trish had dropped out of the governor’s race because she realized she had got so wrapped up in her political career she neglected her family and put her daughter in mortal danger -- and Olivia is once again working a game as a cheerleader as Trish walks in as part of the audience, pushing a baby stroller obviously containing her grandchild (whose sex we never learn, by the way, though Olivia had at least two ultrasounds taken during her pregnancy). But then that’s a piece with a story one of whose plot gimmicks is that Pamela told Olivia not to tell anybody, especially her parents, that she was knocked up -- the only person Olivia confides in is Ashley, a Black girl who’s her best friend on the cheerleading squad (ya remember the cheerleading squad?) -- making this, like so many other movies (including a lot of the Astaire-Rogers musicals, in which the lies led to mistaken-identity gimmicks that were at least genuinely funny), one in which the plot complications would evaporate almost instantly as soon as any one character told any of the other characters the truth.

Cheer Camp Killer (Lifetime Films, Hybrid, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “new” Lifetime movie was yet another one in what’s becoming an awfully tired series of films about unscrupulous cheerleaders, which they’re showing under the collective rubric “Fear the Cheer.” (Last year they did a similar series -- with some of the same movies -- as “Cheer, Rally, Kill!”) This one was called Cheer Camp Killer and was produced by Hybrid along with Lifetime -- who named themselves a producing company as well as an outlet channel on the credits -- and it was directed by Randy Carter from a script by Anna White that followed all the predictable formulae of a Lifetime movie, particularly in this weird “Killer Cheerleader” sub-genre. There’s the Good Cheerleader and the Bad Cheerleader, and this time they’re competing to win the championship in the showcase gig at the end of the cheer summer camp at “Pacific University of Southern California” (which, as my husband Charles pointed out, is a mash-up of two real college names, University of the Pacific and University of Southern California).

The Good Cheerleader is Sophie Jacobs (Mariah Robinson), a lithesome medium-height African-American who was an enthusiastic cheerleader until a year before, when her mom suddenly died of a brain aneurysm (which, we learn later, Sophie blames herself for because when Sophie was four her mom injured herself in the head rescuing her from a tree house, and Sophie is convinced the concussion her mom got doing that led directly to her death over a decade later). Now she’s a reluctant participant in cheer camp and she’s only talked into going by her dad because he points out that the prize is a full-ride scholarship to the college of her choice (who knew colleges offered scholarships in cheer?) and that’s the only way she can afford higher education. The Bad Cheerleader is Victoria Richards (Sydney Malakeh), who goes into the cheer camp with one huge advantage already -- her mom, Beth Richards (Andrea Bogart), is one of the three coaches.

Andrea Bogart and Sophie Malakeh look different enough it’s hard to suspend disbelief and accept them as mother and daughter -- Malakeh is olive-skinned and has long raven-black hair, while Bogart is clearly white and blonde -- but there’s an odd antagonism between them that’s the most interesting aspect of White’s script: Victoria is determined to do whatever she has to do to win the competition, and when she has her moments of guilt and doubt her mom is there to pressure her into whatever dastardly schemes are necessary to ensure her success. In the film’s first scene Victoria and a male co-conspirator act to eliminate one potential winner, Lilly Walker (Monica Rose Betz), by spiking her water bottle with a drug “cocktail” containing both a date-rape drug and a steroid. She’s driving her friend Charlotte Brown (Jacqueline Scislowski) home from a cheer practice when she succumbs to the effects of the drug, loses consciousness, crashes their car into a tree, and when the police find her wrecked car and rescue her she tests positive for a performance-enhancing drug and is expelled from the upcoming cheer camp. Charlotte is convinced Lilly was framed and hopes to find out who did it and why when she arrives at the cheer camp and ends up as Sophie’s roommate.

The cheerleaders are divided into the Blue Team and the Red Team,though we are told that the contest winner always comes fron the Red Team. Sophie and Charlotte end up on the Blue Team along with one of the two male cheerleaders at the camp, Jack (Philip McElroy), who’s been a friend of Sophie’s since they were in second grade together but now that they’ve passed puberty wants to be more than a friend -- though she doesn’t see him “that way” until the very end of the movie. There’s another guy at the cheer camp, Andrew (Christian Seavey), who ends up on the Red Team and we get to see very little of him after that. But the hottest guy in the movie is neither Jack (we’re supposed to think he’s irresistible but he’s so white-bread he would be conceivable casting for a biopic of Pat Boone or Mike Pence) nor Andrew but Greg (Andrew Rogers), the camp’s medical director. Given how much of the usual iconography of Lifetime holds that the sexiest man in the movie is also a black-hearted villain, it’s no surprise that Greg turns out to be Victoria’s co-conspirator: it was he who was the guy lurking around in the prologue sequence who spiked Lilly’s water (after using his pharmacological knowledge to concoct the drug “cocktail” in the first place). He’s also having a hot and heavy sexual affair with Victoria, who seems to have enlisted him in her plot by offering him her hot bod, though that doesn’t stop Victoria from offering herself to Jack as well by agreeing to “coach” him privately until he figures out what she’s doing and why.

Midway through the movie Victoria hosts a secret party at one of the dorm rooms at which the underage characters drink alcohol out of the obligatory red plastic Dixie cups (Dixie makes these in other colors but red seems to be the one out of which teenagers drink in Lifetime movies -- though Charles works as a grocery clerk and he tells me red plastic Dixie cups are the ones of choice for similar partiers in real life). Two of the coaches -- a heavy-set Black woman referred to only as “Coach Cooper” and who’s the overall boss of the camp (Kelli Dawn Hancock) and Beth Richards’ red-headed and considerably less crazy colleague, Mary Parker (Jennifer Marshall) -- get wind of this and come to break up the party, but in a scene straight out of a 1920’s or 1930’s movie about Prohibition Jack stumbles onto them, warns the guests and gets everybody to hide the booze. Only one of the partiers, Kara Meyer (Ariel Yasmine), has been partying more heartily than the others and she gets a disciplinary warning.

Later on Victoria tries to get Sophie expelled by befriending her and offering to take her to “a club where they never check I.D.’s,” where she gets Sophie drunk. The two return to cheer camp well after curfew and get caught by a campus security guard (who’s unidentified on imdb.com but he’s enough of a hottie that if we’d seen more of him he might have given Andrew Rogers a run for his money as the sexiest guy in this film), only they weasel out of it by giving the guard false names. Victoria says she’s Kara Walker and Sophie says she’s her roommate Charlotte -- and this gets Kara thrown out of the camp and Victoria off the hook, especially since her mom is on the disciplinary committee and she’s able to talk the other members out of actually calling the security guard to identify the people he detained and see if they were really who they told him they were.

Victoria also alienates Sophie from her Blue Team friends by secretly recording them talking about her and then editing the sound file to make it seem like they were insulting her. Charlotte tries to get her revenge by secretly filming Victoria and Greg having sex and then sending the file to the coaches -- but Victoria, showing a truly Trumpian skill at avoiding being held accountable for her misdeeds, claims that the footage is of Greg raping her, so she gets to stay in camp while he’s fired in disgrace. Before Greg gets fired Victoria uses him in one of her other plots -- she tells Sophie that for their showcase routine she will have to be lifted and be on top of the human pyramid, which Sophie can’t do because she’s been petrified of heights ever since her mom fell and hurt her head rescuing Sophie from a tree house (you remember -- like a 1930’s screenwriter, Anna White knows how to “plant”), and she loses her balance, falls and injures her ankle. Greg tells her she shouldn’t participate for the rest of the camp, but she announces, “I’m going to get a second opinion,” and she must have done so because the next time we see her she’s back on the Blue Team with her friends and seemingly none the worse for wear.

So Victoria decides the only way she can win is to kidnap Sophie, take her to a deserted place, suspend her from a tree in a classic bondage pose and keep her there overnight until the showcase is over. Only, in a bush move that would qualify Victoria for America’s Stupidest Criminals, she neglects either to take or to destroy Sophie’s cell phone, so Sophie’s friends Charlotte and Jack are able to locate and rescue her just in time for the competition, which of course Sophie wins while Victoria is arrested by a police officer (Jackie Meriau, who’s normally a makeup artist and has no other acting credits besides this one) we’ve never heard of who’s figured out Victoria’s whole plot and busted her (though there wasn’t any indication that Victoria’s mom Beth got held to account for her role in the skulduggery). The final scene shows Sophie grateful for winning the contest and melting her heart enough to let Jack give her a surprisingly diffident kiss.

Cheer Camp Killer is about midway on the quality level for the genre -- and Lifetime’s insistence on showing cheerleader movie after cheerleader movie is getting more than a bit wearing (especially seeing so many films cut to a virtually identical cliche pattern makes each new one seem less distinguishable from all the others). Randy Carter’s direction is acceptable and professional, but there’s only one scene -- Sophie’s and Victoria’s drunken walk back to campus -- where he achieves any of the Gothic effects other Lifetime directors have sustained through entire movies. The cast is acceptable, and Sydney Malakeh’s cool villainy is better than that (her only other credit is another Lifetime movie, The Wrong Stepfather, which I seem to have missed, but her combination of smoldering good looks and sinister “cool” would seem to give her a good shot at stardom), but overall Cheer Camp Killer is a pretty ordinary Lifetime production, just another attempt by Lifetime’s management to get straight men to watch their channel by offering them glimpses of scantily clad teenage female flesh. Charles had a hard time with the film because all the cheerleaders looked similarly competent and he had to take it on faith which ones screenwriter White told us were the best -- though I did think Mariah Robinson looked at least a bit better than the others -- and I did like the fact that the film showed Black Mariah Robinson and white Philip McElroy headed for a romance (and a sexual relationship) at the end without making any kind of an issue about it!

Something to Sing About (Grand National, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

As I’ve done on previous weeks when a Lifetime movie wrapped at 10 p.m., Charles was home and he and I had time for another movie, I looked for something in the DVD collection and found it in Something to Sing About, a 1937 musical produced, directed, written and scored by Victor Schertzinger for Grand National Pictures. Grand National was an independent studio founded in 1935 with major ambitions. Its CEO, Edward L. Alperson, wanted to make major pictures with major stars -- and he landed one in 1936 when James Cagney filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Warner Bros. and won in the trial court. Suddenly Cagney was a free agent -- but there were enough gentlemen’s agreements in place between the major studios that none of their production chiefs would risk Jack Warner’s wrath by signing him. Alperson swooped in and offered Cagney a contract to work at Grand National, and for his first film there Alperson gave him Great Guy, the kind of script he’d been making at Warners: a tough crime melodrama in which Cagney played an inspector with the Bureau of Weights and Measures looking to bust food retailers running crooked scales that short-changed customers and suppliers. He even hired Mae Clarke,who’d co-starred with Cagney in two previous films, The Public Enemy (1931) -- she was the woman on the receiving end of Cagney’s famous grapefruit -- and Lady Killer (1933).

Great Guy was both an artistic and a commercial disappointment, so for his second Grand National film Cagney and Alperson decided to get more experimental. Though Something to Sing About is one of Cagney’s most obscure films, he devoted an entire chapter of his autobiography to it, mainly because it was the only musical he got to make between Footlight Parade (1933) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Cagney said in his book that he always considered himself a song-and-dance man at heart and his greatest career regret was that he had got to do so few musicals. Something to Sing About casts Cagney as “Terry Rooney,” true name Thaddeus McGillicuddy, who when the film begins leads a dance band in a New York City nightclub in which he does spectacular dance routines involving a staircase (one wonders if he learned to dance up and down stairs from the same person Fred Astaire got it from -- the great Black tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; there certainly seems to be a lot of Bojangles in Cagney’s excellent dancing here) that suddenly turns into a slide at the end. He also has a girlfriend, Rita Wyatt (screen newcomer Evelyn Daw), who sings with the band and who appears in his floor-show number in which they do a surprisingly Astaire-and-Rogersish move (in the middle of their dance she tries to pull away from him and he yanks her back).

Things take a turn for Our Hero when he gets offered a one-film contract to make a film called Any Old Love for Galor Studios. (Incidentally this film “outs” the 1938 anti-marijuana exploitation film Reefer Madness as a Grand National production; the big car chase in Reefer Madness takes place on a street set built for this film that features a theatre marquee prominently advertising “Terry Rooney in ‘Any Old Love’.” I mention this because there have been a lot of fanciful tales spun about Reefer Madness and the auspices under which it was made.) When he arrives in Hollywood Terry is put through the wringer, introduced to press agent Hank Meyers (William Frawley, best known for playing Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy) and forced to pose suggestively with four young starlets under Galor contract (one of whom was apparently the young Rita Hayworth, who was at Grand National making a Tex Ritter Western) while his true love waits forlornly back in New York, where the band is still performing but business at the nightclub has nose-dived. He calls her person-to-person long-distance (at a time when any phone call out of your local area code -- especially one to the other end of the country -- was hellaciously expensive) and she sings him a new song she and the band have written about how much she misses him, “Right or Wrong.”

At Galor, Terry is confronted by a hair stylist, a makeup person (played by, of all people, Dwight Frye -- how many other movies can you think of which contain both a cast member from I Love Lucy and a cast member from Dracula?) and a vocal coach who tries to get “pear-shaped tones” out of him in a scene copied almost exactly in Singin’ in the Rain 15 years later. Schertzinger and his writing partner, Austin Parker, fill Something to Sing About with lots of fish-out-of-water gags satirizing the Hollywood meatgrinder and what it did to potentially new and innovative talent, and they also make the studio head tell the film’s director and everyone else connected with Any Old Love not to tell Terry how good he is in it, lest he develop a swelled head and “go Hollywood” on them. There’s also a nice anti-racist joke in that Terry has been assigned a Japanese valet, Ito (played by Philip Ahn, who was actually Korean and who would have made a first-rate Charlie Chan if the studios that made the Chan talkies had been interested in casting a real-life Asian) speaking the usual broken-English stereotype -- until he feels comfortable enough around Terry to let his guard drop and speak perfect Engtlish. He later explains that he came to Hollywood hoping for a career as an actor, but .. he leaves it unspoken but I’m sure moviegoers even in 1937 read that scene as the attack on racial stereotyping Schertzinger and Parker no doubt had in mind.

Told throughout the production of Any Old Love that he’s no good -- to which Cagney responds by telling the studio people that if they think he’s so bad they can always fire him and he can go back to leading his band -- and with only Ito and his phone calls to Rita to sustain him emotionally, Terry is about to shoot the final scene of Any Old Love, a bar fight. One of the stunt people explains the “pass” system by which movie fights were staged, but the other guys on the set hate Terry so much they decide to fight him for real -- and Cagney gets his biggest dose of fisticuffs in the film, as the director realizes what’s going on and keeps the cameras rolling so he can liven up the movie with a real on-screen brawl. Terry finishes Any Old Love but then slips out of Hollywood before Galor can sign him to a contract to make another movie; instead he asks Rita to meet him in San Francisco, where he secretly marries her and takes her on a vacation on a tramp steamer to the South Seas. There’s more colorful dancing between Cagney and the sailors, including one who’s in rather crude drag and gets thrown overboard at the end of the sequence.

When they return to San Francisco they find that Any Old Love has become a huge hit and Terry is mobbed by fans as he walks by a movie theatre that’s showing his film. The theatre owner reports him to Galor and the studio head flies out to San Francisco with a contract for a large amount of money but one provision that appalls Terry -- it says he is to remain single for the seven-year term of the contract because the studio is merchandising him as America’s Heartthrob and women moviegoers won’t have fantasies about him if he’s already married. Eventually Terry agrees to Rita’s idea that she be hired by the studio as his “confidential secretary” keeping track of his fan mail so they can at least be together professionally, if not personally, but even that doesn’t work as Terry gets called out to premieres and other public events. What’s worse, Hank Meyers decides to concoct a publicity “romance” between Terry and the co-star of his new film, Steffi Hajos (Mona Barrie, obviously copying real-life Frenchwoman Fifi D’Orsay’s performance as a similar vamp who tried to lure a nice Irish boy in Hollywood, Bing Crosby that time, in the 1933 film Going Hollywood), and there’s a marvelous scene in which Terry and Steffi are talking about how they’re going to break the news to his previous partner that he’s leaving her so he and Steffi can be together … and just when you’re thinking, “Oh, no, he’s going to dump that nice wife of his for the vamp,” then the camera pulls back and it’s revealed that this is only a scene they’re shooting for their film together.

The head of Galor and the film’s director realize that if Terry sees the headline announcing his alleged “engagement” to Steffi before they get the last scene of his film “in the can,” he’ll go ballistic and walk out. They try to intercept anyone who might show him the newspaper with the devastating headline, but he sees it and disappears … ultimately turning up in New York, where the owner of the nightclub where Terry used to perform is advertising “Mrs. Terry Rooney” as their star vocalist. She’s reluctant to go on, to say the least, but agrees to do so to save the band members’ jobs -- and then of course Terry himself crashes the performance, waves in front of his wife’s face a newspaper with a banner headline that his engagement to Steffi was just a P.R. hoax, and the two dance together and presumably live happily ever after as real-life co-stars both on and off the screen.

Though it was a flop at the time, Something to Sing About has held up surprisingly well; its sometimes bitter jokes about the motion picture industry and the treatment of its stars by studio executives no doubt sat well with Cagney, who had got to make it only after a legal dispute with Warners, and Schertzinger proves an able director with a penchant for “breaking the frame” -- for reminding the audience that we are only watching a movie -- would stand him in good stead when he directed the first two Bob Hope-Bing Crosby “Road” films in the early 1940’s. Something to Sing About has a plot that makes sense and portrays characters with real emotional conflicts -- and Cagney rises to the challenge of a part that at once takes advantage of his feisty screen image and lampoons it. Evelyn Daw is also excellent -- why this pleasant-voiced singer and highly talented actress (she gets some unforgettable closeups subtly but unmistakably expressing heartbreak) made only one more film, a Smith Ballew Western called Panamint’s Bad Man, is beyond me - and though this isn’t a heart-rending melodrama like the first “official” version of A Star Is Born (made the same year) it’s one of classic-era Hollywood’s better films about itself.

Alas for Grand National’s fortunes, Warner Bros, appealed the verdict that had allowed Cagney to sign with Grand National and won him back. In turn Grand National sold Warners the third Cagney project they had developed -- a grim tale of the slums, the church and crime called Angels with Dirty Faces written by Rowland Brown, who had hoped to make a comeback as screenwriter and director with that film. Instead Warners put their own people on it -- writer John Wexley and director Michael Curtiz -- and the movie was one of Cagney’s biggest hits and best-remembered films. Grand National itself stuck it out for two more years, mostly on the profits from their musical Westerns with Tex Ritter, before going out of business and selling what was left of the company to RKO. Alas, the print we were watching (from an American Movie Classics DVD) didn’t include Grand National’s charming logo -- a clock tower in which the hands of the clock wiped in the company’s name across its face.