The Christmas Setup (Lifetime Pictures, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020, 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime premiered a new holiday movie called The Christmas Setup. Ordinarily I avoid Lifetime’s holiday fare -- which this year they started at the end of October and are continuing to the new year -- because it gets way too sappy for my taste, but I’d seen previews for their Christmas slate and noticed one clip in which two men were kissing each other. Through some online searching I was able to find that amongst the usual clutch of Lifetime Christmas movies there was at least one whose protagonists were two Gay men, and I checked the Lifetime schedules regularly to see when it would be on. I found out the title was The Christmas Setup and it was so-called because the central character was actually played by former The Nanny star Fran Drescher as Kate Spencer, who lives on Connor Avenue in Milwaukee and is trying to set up her Gay son Hugo (Ben Lewis), a New York attorney, with his old high-school crush object Patrick (Blake Lee). Patrick returned to Milwaukee after starting a sensational Internet start-up called Cassandra, which supposedly can predict its users’ futures based on algorithms representing everything they’ve done in the past (like a lot of fictional apps in recent Lifetime movies, this frankly sounds scary and Big Brother-ish) and then selling it for so much money he never has to work again, though he’s helping out his father’s Christmas tree lot and donating the money to charity. The two “meet cute” when Patrick delivers a particularly enormous tree to the Spencer home -- my husband Charles wondered why such an obviously Jewish actress as Drescher, whom he called “the last living exemplar of Yiddish Art Theatre acting,” was cast as a woman who’s the head of her neighborhood’s Christmas celebration committee (and I was wondering how all these people were going outside in a Wisconsin winter with only light sweaters and jackets on and without their breaths steaming) -- and Patrick gets roped into Kate’s elaborate plans for celebrating Christmas, including the annual “Santa Express” letter-writing party to Santa Claus at the train’s virtually unused 1920’s-era station thrown every Christmas Eve. There’s also a move afoot by the local government to have the station torn down and a new, ugly “train kiosk” put up in its place, which Kate is fighting and so far is losing.

Before he left New York to see his family -- and took his fag-hag quasi-girlfriend and co-worker Madelyn (Ellen Wong) with him, leading his mom to wonder if he’d turned straight and got married to a woman -- Hugo had got into an argument with the managing partner of his law firm (cast with an African-American actor just to show how ecumenical and integrated everything in this idealized Lifetime vision of America is) in which he pleaded to be made a partner in the firm and got a noncommittal response. A number of things happen that more or less bring Hugo and Patrick together as well as setting up mini-roadblocks to their burgeoning relationship; in one scene they’re stringing Christmas lights on Kate’s roof when one of them accidentally kicks away the ladder they used to get up there, and while there Patrick talks about how much he hates lawyers since he was accused of plagiarizing the concept of Cassandra and he resented the big law firms whose attorneys tried to kill his sale of it. Where I thought this was going was it would turn out that Hugo was one of the lawyers who had worked the case against Patrick’s company and that would be the complication writer Michael J. Murray would use to derail, at least temporarily, Hugo’s and Patrick’s potential affair. Instead Madelyn, at a pre-Christmas trivia game Kate has organized in which the final question was in what city did Charles Dickens write A Christmas Carol, blurts out, “London -- and that’s where Hugo is going!” We’ve already found out that Hugo has been offered the partnership after all, but it comes with a commitment to relocate to London and open a branch of the law firm there (though I wondered how much good that would do given the dramatic differences between the British and American legal systems).

Then Patrick invites Hugo to a “pop-up cabaret” on Christmas eve where the entertainer is a drag queen (though she sings jazz and she sings it with her/his own voice) and he’s brought up to the stage to sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” (Well, the song was written for Judy Garland, after all, and therefore it has Gay “cred.”) All the emotion of his family reunion -- including his success at figuring out a way to save the beloved train station (it had a destination sign reading “Forthton” and I, of course, joked that on the other side there’d be one called “Backton”) from demolition and, along the way, discovering that Eugene Connor, the 1920’s philanthropist who built the neighborhood, was Gay and left his entire fortune to a long-time partner named Ashby -- causes Hugo to turn down the big promotion to London, quit the law firm and settle in Milwaukee with his new light o’love. And the one between Hugo and Patrick isn’t the only match Kate sets up for one of her kids: Hugo’s straight older brother Aiden (Chad Connell, who actually did more for me physically than either Ben Lewis or Blake Lee!) and Hugo’s platonic girlfriend Madelyn (ya remember Madelyn?) also get the hots for each other even though he’s in the military and is stationed in Indianapolis. In other words, The Christmas Setup is your typical Lifetime holiday romance -- two people who casually met years earlier are brought together by the holidays and end up paired off as a couple despite the differences that set them apart originally -- whose only difference from the norm is that the two who meet up and pair off are both men.

Apparently Ben Lewis and Blake Lee are a Gay couple off-screen as well -- so at least they could kiss each other on-screen (though that’s as far as they go -- a couple of relatively chaste on-the-lips kisses -- Lifetime has offered us some quite lubricious soft-core straight porn but they’re obviously still not ready to go there with two guys or two girls yet) without raising the issues straight Taron Egerton had to face when he said his biggest challenge in playing the Gay Elton John in Rocketman was having to kiss men on screen. The film was decently directed by Pat Mills (a man, and presumably straight judging from the picture of him with his arm around a woman on his imdb.com page), who did the best he could with a pretty preposterous script -- and the cast was O.K., though Drescher always treads a fine line between funny and intolerable (though I could identify because I too am a Gay man who had a crazy Jewish mother!) and Ben Lewis has too much of the overgrown twink about him to do much for me either as a body or a personality. In fact, one of the weirder miscalculations in the script is that when director Mills finally gives us a shot of him dressed in tight blue jeans that make him look at least a little bit sexy (he doesn’t seem to have much of a basket, but I’ll let his real-life partner Blake Lee worry about that!), Madelyn immediately makes him change from the supposedly out-of-style jeans to a pair of brown pants of a velvet-like material that seemed to me more like pajamas than anything else. (Then again, I’ve seen men going out with pants that look an awful lot like pajamas and sometimes get mistaken for them.) The idea of two people, whatever their genders or orientations, starting a casual friendship, losing touch with each other, then re-meeting and becoming lovers isn’t unknown to me -- Charles and I had a brief friendship in the early 1980’s (he met me and my then-girlfriend at a political party his mom was throwing, and a few months later I came out as Gay) before he left town, and we re-met and became a couple shortly after he returned to San Diego -- but as presented here it’s the stuff of a million movies and the only real novelty of this is that they’re both Gay men.

Enchantment (Samuel Goldwyn Pictures, RKO, 1948)

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

Earlier in the evening I’d watched a couple of movies on Turner Classic Movies, including a 1948 film called Enchantment that, though it wasn’t Gay-themed, did touch on some of the same career-vs.-love and responsibilities-vs.-love issues as The Christmas Setup. It was based on a 1945 novel called A Fugue in Time in Britain and Take Three Tenses in the U.S. The author was Rumer Godden, a woman born in Sussex (though from the name I’d previously assumed she was Welsh) who like a lot of other female authors of the 19th and 20th centuries published under a name that didn’t give away her true gender (her full name was Margaret Rumer Godden and her older sister and occasional collaborator wrote under the name Jon Godden; also I’d assumed the last name was pronounced “GOD-den” until the late TCM host Robert Osborne said “GOAD-den,” and since Osborne actually knew her I’m assuming he was right.). I’d first heard of her when TCM showed Black Narcissus, a 1947 film based on her 1939 novel of life in a Roman Catholic convent in the Himalayas and the young prince (Sabu) the British convent girls are there to educate (the star is Deborah Kerr, anticipating her role in the film The King and I as a governess to a royal family in Asia by nine years). It was produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and it’s a gorgeous film visually (all of it was shot inside a studio, with painted backdrops and process screens, even though much of it takes place outdoors in a mountainous country) but dramatically rather silly and oddly sited in the Powell-Pressburger oeuvre between two masterpieces, A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948).

In the wake of back-to-back hits with The Best Years of Our Lives and The Bishop’s Wife, producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights to A Fugue in Time despite its daring (for the late 1940’s) non-linear structure. There’s an opening and closing narration by a house in London that when we first see it is in a still habitable but partially wrecked state, courtesy of a German bombing raid during World War II. Among the people still inhabiting it during the war but before the raid are General Sir Roland Dane (David Niven in so much white hair and age makeup I didn’t recognize him at first), who gets a houseguest during the war: an American servicewoman stationed in London named Grizel (Evelyn Keyes) who turns out to be his grand-niece, though given that two generations, not just one, have passed between this film’s two (not three!) tenses one would have thought great-grand-niece would have been more likely. (By coincidence David Niven had a sister named Grizel.) She was told by her late mother to look up the house in London and reach out to its resident, and the film snaps back and forth between the 1940’s and the 1890’s, when Sir Roland was a young man living in the same house and about to be shipped off to fight in the British war in Afghanistan. (Afghanistan has been called “the graveyard of empires” because it defeated Alexander the Great in the ancient era, the British in the 1890’s, the Russians in the 1980’s and the U.S. in our longest-running war that began after the 9/11 attacks and is still going on -- President Trump wanted to end it but the next President, Joe Biden, is likely to keep it going.)

While Roland and his sister Selina were still children (as which they’re played by Peter Miles and Sherlee Collier) their father took in an orphan named Lark Ingoldsby (Gigi Perreau as a child, Goldwyn star Teresa Wright as an adult) after her parents were killed in a bridge accident. Rollo develops a crush on Lark while Selina -- played as an adult by Jayne Meadows in an acidulous performance that’s by far the best acting in the film; who knew that nice Mrs. Steve Allen had such a brilliant bitch role on her resume? -- can’t stand her from the get-go. Rollo ultimately proposes to Lark -- as does his brother Pelham (Philip Friend) and an Italian count Pelham introduces her to, the Marchese Del Laudi (“Marquis of Praise” -- really?) -- but Selina sabotages Rollo’s chances by pulling strings to get him an army promotion that will include five years’ service in Afghanistan in a posting at which he won’t be allowed to bring his wife. So Lark ultimately marries the Marchese and moves with him to Italy despite Rollo’s warning -- “They eat larks for breakfast in Italy,” a line of such demented stupidity it’s a testament to David Niven’s professionalism as an actor that he was able to get it out of his mouth without laughing his head off. (Then again, maybe he did laugh his head off and it might have taken director Irvng Reis a large number of takes to get one where Niven didn’t.) Rollo serves out his time in Afghanistan, rises through the ranks of the officer corps and ultimately becomes a general -- though he retired and therefore isn’t taking an active role in World War II -- but he’s never forgotten Lark, nor apparently did he ever marry or have kids himself.

This 1890’s story is intercut with a modern plot line in which Grizel Dane falls in love with Pax Masterson (Farley Granger), a Canadian officer who’s stationed in London during World War II -- we know he’s Canadian because his uniform has a little patch reading “CANADA” on the arm near the shoulder -- and it’s yet another of these amorphous roles Granger got stuck with during his years under contract with Goldwyn in which he’s supposed to be a romantic hero but he’s just too diffident to be believable. (His three best films -- Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train -- were for directors who managed to harness that diffidence in the service of portraying morally ambiguous characters.) It also doesn’t help that Granger is saddled with one of those thin “roo” moustaches that usually marked an actor as a no-good seducer or rotter (though Ronald Colman wore one throughout his career and it didn’t have that effect on him). Not surprisingly, the idea of the two interlocking plots is that the Granger and Keyes characters are about to make the same mistake the Niven and Wright characters did 50 years earlier -- to let the war come between them (Pax actually proposes marriage to Grizel, but she puts him off with the usual it’s-too-soon-we-barely-know-each-other line -- a far cry from the way Judy Garland and Granger’s future Strangers on a Train co-star Robert Walker handled a similar situation in Vincente Minnelli’s marvelous The Clock) and ultimately break them up -- and their plot line culminates during a German bombing raid on London in which Grizel chases Pax through the streets as the bombs are falling, after a few harrowing escapes they run into each other, and it’s Roland who’s killed when a bomb lands on the house (ya remember the house?) and partially destroys it -- though the house, which introduced the film in its ruined state, assures us in a spoken epilogue by narrator William Johnstone that it will be rebuilt and presumably continue to serve future generations.

Enchantment was the last film on which the great cinematographer Gregg Toland served as director of photography before his death at only 44 -- though it didn’t offer him much of a showcase because most of it takes place inside That House and it’s only during that climax that Toland gets to achieve the brilliant, spectacular images for which he was known. Director Henry Koster., who’d worked with Toland on Goldwyn’s immediately previous production The Bishop’s Wife, told Goldwyn biographer Carol Easton that Toland’s nickname was “Little Grief” -- “he called himself that,” Koster said -- and said he was always asking directors for permission to do extra takes, particularly on close-ups. Toland’s best directors, William Wyler and Orson Welles, had the imagination and power to make the most of Toland’s gifts; here, saddled with director Irving Reis (who had done excellent work in RKO’s Saint and Falcon “B” detective series but seemed overwhelmed by a major production), Toland had little chance to do much -- and the scenes around the house’s fireplace, with its big mantel, just recall how much more Welles and Toland got out of a similar set in Citizen Kane. Enchantment is the sort of O.K. movie that could have been really good with a stronger director, a stronger cast (as it is Jayne Meadows as the villainess out-acts the rest of the actors) and a more sensitive screenwriter than John Patrick, who here (as in some of his later credits, notably Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing) writes lines of such stultifying banality you wonder if his previous employer was a greeting card company. It was a box-office failure on initial release, apparently largely because the double time structure and the constant switching back and forth between generations confused audience (just as the multiple-narrator structure of Citizen Kane had); it would be interesting to imagine a modern-day remake now that non-linear films with multiple time structures are almost a commonplace!

The Burglar (Samson Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1957)

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

After Enchantment TCM showed a movie that was much more to my taste: The Burglar, a film noir shot in 1955 but not released until 1957. It was filmed on location in Philadelphia and produced by Louis W. Kellman, who owned a film processing lab there and hoped that making a movie would encourage other filmmakers to shoot in Philadelphia and thereby get more business for his lab. The Burglar was directed by Paul Wendkos and based on a pulp novel by David Goodis, who’d briefly hit the heights of success when his second novel, Dark Passage (1945), was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and bought by Warner Bros., who filmed it in 1947 with Delmer Daves as writer/director (after the studio had rejected Goodis’s own adaptation of his novel) and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as stars. He got work in Hollywood as a writer but by 1950 he was disgusted with the movie business and retreated to his original home town, Philadelphia, where he cranked out pulps for the Fawcett Crest Gold Medal line and used the money to pay for the care of his schizophrenic brother Herbert. When Kellman and Wendkos learned that the author of the book they were about to film was living in the city they were going to film it in, they sought out Goodis and hired him to write the script -- the only time Goodis got to write one of the movies based on his novels. I have vague memories of reading The Burglar in a modern-day reprint years ago but had very little recollection of it -- perhaps because Goodis wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style (if Dashiell Hammett has sometimes been called the Ernest Hemingway of noir, you could argue that Goodis was its William Faulkner) and frequently stopped his plots in their tracks to get inside the mental processes of his characters in long digressions that his pulp editors didn’t mind (at least they filled up the page count!) but movie producers and directors did.

The Burglar opens with a fake newsreel about tensions in the Cold War and lady athletes bouncing around on pogo sticks before cutting to a story about Sister Sara (Phoebe Mackay), whose millionaire backer has sold just about everything he owned to her for nominal sums, including a house he willed her and she’s inherited as well as a priceless jeweled necklace of emeralds and platinum. In the audience watching this newsreel is Nathaniel “Nat” Harbin (Dan Duryea, 10 years after his classic noirs for Fritz Lang -- Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street -- and looking like he hasn’t weathered the years well), who works out a plan for himself and his three confederates -- Gladden (Jayne Mansfield before she got her 20th Century-Fox contract as a potential replacement for Marilyn Monroe and made her best-known films, The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), Baylock (Peter Caroll) and Dohmer (Mickey Shaughnessy) -- to steal the necklace. Nat sends Gladden to case the place by posing as a would-be devotee of Sister Sara’s cult, and she returns with a rough plan of the house and the knowledge that from 11 to 11:15 p.m. Sister Sara always watches a local late-night TV news program hosted by John Facenda (who actually was a Philadelphia TV news anchor at the time and later became the narrator for NFL Films), and since she will be downstairs watching TV the burglars will be able to break into her upstairs bedroom and steal the necklace as long as they finish before 11:15, when the show ends and Sara will go to bed. On the night of the burglary two police officers spot Nat outside the house waiting beside the getaway car, and when the burglars leave there’s a shoot-out in which one of the cops is killed while the other (Wendell Phillips) gets a good enough look at Nat the police are able to call in a sketch artist and do a reasonably accurate drawing of him.

From there the film concentrates on the thieves, who are hiding out in a seedy room and getting antsy because the other two want to cash out immediately but Nat is holding out to realize at least some of what the piece is worth instead of selling it to a fence for a fraction of its value. There’s an interesting sense of irony as Wendkos cuts back and forth between the thieves in a room plotting how to turn their loot into cash and the cops also sitting in a room plotting how to find them. Along the way we get a flashback which depicts Nat as a child escaping from an orphanage and ending up as the ward of a professional burglar who literally taught him everything he knew about the craft -- with the result that Nat also became a burglar when the old man died. This is also how he met Gladden, his foster-father’s natural daughter, and dad on his deathbed made Nat swear a promise to take care of Gladden and protect her. Later on we learn that Gladden has stuck with the gang because she was hopelessly in love with Nat -- but Nat kept back from any romantic interest in her because he would have felt like that was dating his sister. Gladden runs away from the gang and goes to Atlantic City, where we see her on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit (the one point in the film where Wendkos exploits Mansfield’s fabled physical assets) and where she meets and starts dating a man -- only he turns out to be the surviving police officer who confronted Nat during the burglary and who, instead of busting him, decided to turn crooked and grab the piece for himself. As part of this plan he assigns his own girlfriend, Della (Martha Vickers, Lauren Bacall’s nymphomaniac sister in The Big Sleep and the crippled victim in The Big Bluff -- and one of those incredibly talented actors who deserved a much bigger career than she got), to come on to Nat in a bar in a surprisingly blatant pickup scene for 1955 -- only he overhears her talking to the corrupt cop and realizes he’s being taken. The film ends with a brutal shoot-out on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier (where Bruce Springsteen would play a lot of his early gigs in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s).

The Burglar is a quite impressive movie, though the acting is wildly variable -- Dan Duryea turns in a fully professional performance but Peter Capell is ridiculously overwrought and Mansfield, though in a sense you’re rooting for her to show that she was more than just a blonde sexpot and she could really act (much the way Monroe had shown real acting chops in such noir roles as The Asphalt Jungle, Don’t Bother to Knock and Niagara), just doesn’t come through. She has one great scene -- in which Gladden tells Nat that she’s always had the hots for him and has lived with him in a continual state of sexual frustration because, hamstrung by his vow to her dad, he’s never seen her “that way” or, if he did, never acted on it -- and there are a couple of moments when she drops her vocal register and sounds quite like her daughter, Mariska Hargitay, in her trademark role as Captain Olivia Benson on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, but for the most part she just seems overwhelmed by the role and I suspect this film would have been considerably stronger if Mansfield and Vickers had switched parts. Where The Burglar scores is in the sheer bravura of its direction and cinematography -- including one fight scene between two of the gang members in which cinematographer Don Malkames (the go-to guy just then for anyone shooting a crime thriller on the East Coast) shoots hand-held and suddenly The Burglar looks like a movie from the Steadicam era instead of one from the 1950’s -- and in Goodis’s script, which offers us keen insights into the characters and turns them into figures of considerably more depth than we usually get in classic noir.

It’s also a movie that benefits from the greater flexibility and portability of movie equipment that began in the 1950’s (especially the adoption of magnetic tape to record the sound -- though film prints still featured optical rather than magnetic soundtracks -- and the development of smaller, lighter cameras and more sensitive film stocks), and Wendkos takes full advantage of these. Eddie Muller in his “Noir Alley” comments on the film noted Wendkos’s stylistic debt to Orson Welles -- particularly in the Citizen Kane-like fake newsreel at the beginning and the use of an amusement park for the climax as in The Lady from Shanghai -- but the film also seems to anticipate later developments in the 1960’s as cameras got even lighter and more portable and it became practical to shoot a film like this in color. The Burglar is a flawed but mostly quite good noir melodrama and well worth seeing!

The Man in the High Castle, season one, episodes 1 and 2: "The New World," "Sunrise" (Amazon Prime, 2015)

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

Last night Charles and I took her second excursion into the world of “streaming” via the Amazon Prime channel, which I subscribed to largely to get quicker free deliveries on Amazon.com orders but which I also wanted to investigate as a streaming channel. Charles had asked if there were a way we could continue to watch movies without accumulating more DVD’s (as our apartment gets more cluttered with books, CD’s, DVD’s, Blu-Rays and more) and so I decided to check out the streaming channel offered with Amazon Prime. The first night we did that (last Tuesday) we watched a glitch-free showing of Michael Moore’s Trump documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 and quite liked the film, even though my intention to write an extended commentary on it for my moviemagg blog got lost because obviously I also want to do an article for the Zenger’s blog on Trump’s bizarre (not so bizarre, really, since he’s already raised a quarter of a billion dollars from loyal donors for his fund to set aside the election results, most of which is going to a Trump “Leadership PAC” with whose funds he can do anything he wants, including live on them -- so Trump is probably making even more money losing the Presidency than he made holding it!) refusal to concede the election and his endorsement of one crazy lawsuit after another to disenfranchise whole states for having had the temerity to vote against him. So I went ahead and renewed my subscription to Amazon Prime and agreed to start paying for it after two months’ free trial, and last night Charles and I took our second excursion into the “streaming” world via Amazon’s original production of a TV series based on Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle.

This, perhaps coincidentally, is also a depiction of a fascist-ruled America, a so-called “counterfactual novel” in which the author imagines how the world might have gone if a particular major historical event had turned out differently from the way it actually did. In Dick’s case the major historical event he imagined turning out differently was the outcome of World War II: in his version the Nazis were the first country to develop an atomic bomb and they dropped one on Washington, D.C., destroying it and essentially ending the war on their terms. The book was published in 1962 and won the Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel the next year, and the film version kept the novel’s 1962 setting. The victorious Axis powers have divided the United States into three occupation zones: the Japanese Federal District in the West, direct Nazi Germanr rule in the East and Midwest, and a so-called “neutral zone” in the Rocky Mountains between them. (The same year Dick wrote his novel, William A. Shirer published his history The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and followed it up with a magazine article explaining that this was how the Axis powers actually planned to divide up the U.S. if they’d conquered it: the Japanese would have ruled the western third of the country and the Germans the rest.) Adolf Hitler is still alive but is suffering from Parkinson’s disease and is expected to die soon, and the world in general and the Japanese in particular is bracing for the succession struggle they expect after Hitler’s death. The Japanese are particularly worried about this because the two top contenders to succeed Hitler are Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, and the Japanese are concerned that either of those new Fuhreren will break the German-Japanese alliance and launch a war of conquest against Japan.

The MacGuffin is a series of films called The Man in the High Castle depicting an alternative universe in which the Allies won the war (the films are represented by actual newsreel footage of the real events), and the Nazi and Japanese authorities regard mere possession of 16 mm copies of these films as an act of treason. The central characters are Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), who’s ostensibly a Resistance fighter who gets the assignment to drive a large truck full of coffemakers from Nazi-ruled New York City to Canon City, Nevada in the neutral zone, though about two-thirds of the way through it’s revealed that he’s really a Nazi agent in constant communication with an Obergruppenfuhrer, an American who’s a low-level Nazi officer (and who’s seen at home with his family, including a son who’s proudly showing off a Hitler Youth uniform the way real American boys in 1962 would have shown off a Boy Scout uniform -- it reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” and also of the Law and Order rerun I recently saw in which one of the characters is a hit man who has a wife and a normal suburban life and who takes his dog with him when he’s on the job -- he’s an ordinary suburbanite who leaves for work in the morning like anyone else, only his job is killing people and this ordinary suburban family man’s job is torturing and killing enemies of the Reich); Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos), who takes over as courier of some of the films to Canon City after her sister is caught and summarily killed by Japanese agents; and Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), who’s marked for death by the Nazis for being one-quarter Jewish, though they keep him alive under torture long enough to extract the information of just where his girlfriend was going. They successfully get him to talk by threatening to execute his sister, nephew and niece, whom they seal in a locked room and introduce the killing gas “Zyklon-D” (the actual gas used in the Holocaust was Zyklon-B but Dick assumed there would be at least two generations of improvements in it by 1962). Later, when Frank finally talks, the Nazi officials who questioned him say they had promised to free his relatives if he cooperated, but word of his cooperation reached the people holding them too late.

Indeed, the most powerful aspect of the film throughout (at least the two episodes we’ve seen so far) is its dramatization of just what it’s like to live under occupation, and under an absolutely ruthless occupation at that. At any moment you can be picked up by police or just shot on the street, which might be preferable because if they arrest you they will bring you to a place where you’ll be tortured and ordered to give “information” about the Resistance whether you have any or not. After (the real) World War II, the governments and populations of France, the Netherlands and other countries that had come under Nazi rule tended to see people’s lives under the occupations as either black or white, either collaborator or resister, when I suspect the vast majority of people neither collaborated nor resisted but simply survived, stayed out of trouble as much as they could, maybe went along with the regime to an extent simply to make more money and advance their careers, but never really cared one way or another and gave up being concerned about politics because the risks were too great. That’s certainly the way most of the people in The Man in the High Castle behave, and the filmmakers (the first episode, “The New World,” was directed by David Semel from a script by Frank Spotnitz, and the second, “Sunrise,” was also scripted by Spotnitz but directed by Daniel Percival) do an excellent job of capturing the sheer arbitrariness of absolute authority, the extent to which your life becomes like walking on eggshells because you never know just what innocuous-seeming thing you might do to catch the attention -- and the wrath -- of the authorities.

What I found missing in The Man in the High Castle was any sense of the wild, paranoid world you usually enter when you read a Philip K. Dick novel. I’ve never read The Man in the High Castle, but I’ve read enough Dick to know what his world feels like and the sort of style a filmmaker should bring to it. I’m not necessarily suggesting that every movie based on a story by Philip K. Dick should be shot like Blade Runner (the movie, ironically made the year Dick died -- 1982 -- that established that his works were filmable), but Ridley Scott managed to create a cinematic equivalent to Dick’s writing style and make a movie that was as seemingly off-kilter and thematically elusive as Dick’s prose. It’s the same flaw I’ve found in most of the movies based on works by F. Scott Fitzgerald (ironically, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons came closer to a filmic equivalent of Fitzgerald’s prose style than any of the films I’ve seen that actually adapted Fitzgerald, partly because of Welles’ gifts as a filmmaker and partly because the Ambersons source novel was written by Booth Tarkington, a writer who was a major influence on Fitzgerald): filmmakers can tell certain writers’ stories but finding a cinematic equivalent to these authors’ unique voices eludes them. Still, I quite liked the first two episodes of The Man in the High Castle and look forward to watching more of them -- if only they don’t keep glitching out!

A Holly Dolly Christmas (NOZ Entertainment, Sandollar Productions, CBS=TV, aired December 6, 2020)

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

Charles and I watched last night’s holiday music special, A Holly Dolly Christmas, an hour-long show on CBS that featured Dolly Parton singing the hell out of nine holiday-themed songs and telling some of the familiar anecdotes about her hard-scrabble childhood as one of 11 children born to a tobacco farmer in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The show was absolutely stunning, especially in songs that touched on religion or spirituality -- Parton didn’t do any of the familiar Nativity songs but she did some Christ-themed pieces. She opened with Johnny Marks’ “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” the song that gave her special (and accompanying Christmas album) its punning title, and she was clearly having fun with it, but her second selection was an amazing rendition of the hymn “Precious Memories: which she sang totally a cappella. For the first chorus she was entirely alone; for the rest three other singers joined him to form a gospel quartette with Parton singing an understated but profoundly moving lead. (This was how Elvis Presley wanted to make his 1965 sacred album How Great Thou Art, but without his knowledge or approval the album was remixed to put Elvis’s voice front and center and relegate the other singers to backup status.) Next was a song that summed up much of what Dolly Parton is about: “I’m Coming Home for Christmas,” yet another ode to love and family connections even in the face of dire poverty. (Somehow Dolly Parton can stand -- or sit, as she did through most of this show when she wasn’t actually singing -- dressed in her form-fitting white sequined and tasseled finery and talk about her poor childhood and you believe her, whereas when Jennifer Lopez comes out and sings about how even though she’s rich and famous she’s still “Jenny on the block” the transparent hypocrisy turns my stomach.)

Parton’s next song was “Coat of Many Colors,” which even though I’ve heard the song many times before and sat through the tear-jerking TV-movie made from it (which disappointed me because I’d have liked more about how Dolly got off that mountain and became a Nashville superstar -- as I wrote about it at the time on my moviemagg blog, I was expecting Coal Miner’s Daughter and I got The Waltons), Parton’s simple tale of the coat her mother made for her from scraps (according to the film script, scraps she’d been saving for a quilt for Dolly’s brother, who turned out to be stillborn) moved me to tears again., The next song on the program was “Circle of Love,” which Parton wrote for the Christmas album by her friend and fellow country singer, Jennifer Nettles -- it’s an indication of how great Parton is as a songwriter than she was able to give away a piece of material this good -- and while Dolly gave it a heartfelt rendition the song had moved me even more on The Voice Christmas special, on which she and Nettles sang it as a duet. Then Dolly sang the novelty “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” which she included on her new Christmas album because she wanted something funny. After that she sang “Mary, Did You Know?,” which had also been featured on The Voice Christmas special sung in a heartfelt if not particularly unique voice by Jordan Smith. Dolly’s version compared to Smith’s about as you’d expect -- the well-meaning amateur got swamped by the professional -- but it’s still a problematic song. I asked Charles, my authority on all matters Biblical, the question I’d had after Smith’s performance -- wasn’t Mary told all that stuff in the Annunciation? -- and he said it’s not clear just how much of the Jesus story to be Mary got told by the angel, but she was not the naive little girl described in the song and she certainly would have known she was pregnant.

Then Dolly read a poem called “That’s What Christmas Is” -- I wasn’t sure whether she wrote it that way or it was a song and she simply chose to recite the lyrics rather than sing them -- and along the way she explained her literacy project to send books to children to encourage them to learn to read, which she said her father didn’t know how to read or write when she was growing up. (It wasn’t clear whether he ever learned, though it would seem strange if Dolly Parton endowed a project to encourage literacy inspired by her dad and hadn’t paid to have him taught that skill himself.) She then announced a new song called “I Still Believe,” which married her traditional message of faith, love and overcoming life’s obstacles to an au courant hope and prayer for the say when the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will be over and we’ll be able to walk and talk to each other without those damned masks and “social distancing” requirements. The show closed with a reprise of “A Holly Jolly Christmas” over the closing credits. I give Dolly Parton credit for doing the show simply -- the set was designed to look like a church chapel and there wasn’t any elaborate “production,” just Dolly singing her heart out in a voice that has held up surprisingly well over the years. I also give CBS a lot of credit for trusting Dolly to carry an hour entirely by herself without trotting out a bunch of “guest stars.”

Limite (Limit) (Cinedia, Brazil, 1931)

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

After A Holly Dolly Christmas I switched to Turner Classic Movies for a “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a 1931 movie from Brazil called Limite (the title simply means “Limit,” though its relevance to the story remains unclear -- like a lot of other things about this movie -- and host Jacqueline Stewart pronounced the title “Luh-MEE-chay”). It was produced, written and directed by Mario Peixoto (pronounced “Pay-CHO-to”), a young Brazilian from a well-to-do family who had been to Europe to study art and while there saw a magazine photo of a woman who’d been arrested and handcuffed in front of her face with a device that looked like something from the Middle Ages. Peixoto decided he wanted to make a movie that would open and close with that image, and he hired two experienced cinematographers, Edgar Brazil and Ruy Costa, for a film which gives whole new meanings to the word “elliptical.” Using a carefully chosen set of classical pieces -- almost all by 20th century composers (Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, the string quartets by Debussy and Ravel, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Festivals, Stravinsky’s The Firebird -- particularly the opening “Introduction of the Firebird” and the Infernal Dance of King Kastchei -- and Prokofieff’s “Classical” Symphony, along with a bit of Cesar Franck’s Third Chorale for Organ and Debussy’s ragtime piece “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk”) -- Peixoto shot a film that at times gets so abstract it looks like a forerunner of Geoffrey Reggio’s -qatsi movies even though there is something of a plot.

The film actually has four central characters, though in a strategy to dehumanize them and turn them into archetypes Peixoto decided not to give them names but just call them “Woman #1” (Olga Breno), “Woman #2” (Tatiana Rey), “Man #1” (Raul Schnoor) and “Man #2” (Brutus Pedrera). Like the overall abstract visual style, the business of not giving the characters names was done to death by 1960’s filmmakers who thought they were being oh so innovative. The film got rave reviews from Brazilian critics but flopped commercially and was only shown sporadically in its home country until the 1970’s, when the Brazilian film archive attempted a restoration. What we were seeing was a more complete and extensive restoration from 2007 through 2010, which included copying Peixoto’s original sound design (as preserved on the film’s soundtrack discs -- this is what Sergei Eisenstein called a “sound film” rather than a silent or a talkie, one which would feature no dialogue but would include music and sound effects -- though Peixoto didn’t actually use sound effects -- to tell its story) with more modern recordings of the original classical pieces Peixoto had used. (I suspect that for the Satie Gymnopedie they used the original 1920’s recording Peixoto had used because they couldn’t find a more modern version in the same arrangement; Satie wrote the piece for solo piano but the version we hear is by a woodwind ensemble with an oboe as the lead instrument.) According to Jacqueline Stewart’s introduction, both Eisenstein and Orson Welles saw this film and praised it highly -- and certainly it affected the later (and both ill-starred and uncompleted) projects Eisenstein and Welles did in Latin America, Que Viva Mexico! and It’s All True, respectively.

It’s an utterly haunting film with some of the most gorgeous black-and-white images ever captured on screen -- including a scene that’s heart-rending today for all the wrong reasons, showing the Amazon rain forest as it looked before greedy farmers, developers and speculators started destroying whole swaths of it -- while at the same time attempting to tell something of a story. It seems that one of the women -- the one we saw handcuffed in the opening scene -- escaped from prison with the connivance of a guard (I’m assuming she got him to help her by seducing him -- or have I just been watching too many Lifetime prison stories?) and ultimately got rescued by one of the men (the film takes place in a rowboat at sea but frequently cuts to other parts of the story representing the characters’ flashbacks to their previous lives, which when I read that description on the TCM Web site I thought, “Oh, it’s In Which We Serve without the war”). There’s also a sequence in which the two men confront each other at a cemetery and it turns out -- via three dialogue intertitles that are the only titles in the film (aside from one inserted by the restorers to cover footage that was too badly deteriorated to be salvageable -- most of the film has held up well but one reel has severe nitrate burns on either side of the screen, though as I joked to Charles the nitrate burns only add to the abstractions of the images) -- that they’re at the grave of the wife of one of the men, only shortly after his wife died he started an affair with the other’s partner and the other is naturally upset about it.

This is an odd turn indeed in a movie that for the most part has gone out of its way to avoid either depicting or triggering human emotions -- in one of the few scenes that shows anyone besides the four principals, Peixoto shoots people walking on a street but dehumanizes them by showing only their torsos and legs. Indeed, the one flaw Limite has is this jarring contrast between abstract imagery and these periodic attempts to dramatize the lives and pasts of the principals. I’ve seen other avant-garde silent films, including the 1926 Japanese movie A Page of Madness, that did a better job than Limite in using abstract imagery and virtually no verbal cues while still telling a recognizable story and giving the characters real human dimensions. Still, Limite is a haunting movie, well worth seeing for the sheer beauty of the images (it’s yet another film from the classic era in which the black-and-white scenes are so gorgeous you wonder why anyone ever thought the movies needed color -- at one point I wondered if the film would have been better in color but I decided it probably wouldn’t have been because color would have added too much weight to the imagery and made it almost unwatchable) and a film that would probably repay repeated viewings, if only better to sort out the tangle between its various shards of plot in between all the glorious imagery and the use of music as a deliberate contrast to the images -- essentially music-video technique 50 years early.

They Shall Have Music (Samuel Goldwyn/United Artists, 1939)

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

Last night I ran Charles a DVD of a quite remarkable 1939 movie called They Shall Have Music, which was yet another one of producer Sam Goldwyn’s attempts to win prestige for himself and his boutique studio. He had signed the great and world-famous violinist Jascha Heifetz to a one-picture contract but without any clear idea of just what he was going to do with him. What he and the writers he put on the project, Irmgard von Cube and open Communist John Howard Lawson (he would later become one of the original Hollywood 10 and still later write Film: The Creative Process, which was intended as an introductory textbook for film classes but contained some fascinating reflections of his own history working in Hollywood, including for Right-wingers like Cecil B. DeMille), came up with was a mashup of Dead End -- Sidney Kingsley’s hit play about low-life tenement kids in New York City and the criminal temptations they’re subjected to, which Goldwyn had filmed two years earlier -- and Universal’s 1937 blockbuster One Hundred Men and a Girl, starring Deanna Durbin and Leopold Stokowski.

Cube and Lawson obviously were influenced by the writers of One Hundred Men and a Girl -- Hans Kraly, Bruce Manning, Charles Kenyon and James Mulhauser, in the tale they came up with of the impoverished Lawson School of Music (one wonders if John Howard Lawson named the school after himself!), with Walter Brennan as its founder and principal teacher (essentially the Adolphe Menjou role in One Hundred Men and a Girl), while Heifetz took Stokowski’s role as the grey (not-so-grey in Heifetz’s case) eminence from the world of classical music who comes in at the end and saves everybody and everything. The plot deals with Frankie (Gene Reynolds, who remained in the business though not as an actor: he was one of the producers of the 1970’s and 1980’s TV series M*A*S*H), who leads a gang of four street thugs who bully other kids out of their carfare home. Frankie is living with his mother and an evil stepfather (an obvious gender reversal of the Cinderella story!) who threatens to beat him and put him in reform school (and, as hardened 1930’s moviegoers well knew, “reform school” never reformed anybody; instead it just served as apprenticeship for a career as an adult criminal).

Locked by his stepdad in their building’s basement, Frankie finds a violin that belonged to his late real father and recalls dad having taught him a few of the basics. But he’s more interested in the $4 he can get from a pawnbroker for it to add to his gang’s “treasury” than in the instrument. Then, while he and his friend Limey (Terry Kilburn) -- so called because he speaks with an otherwise inexplicable British accent -- are busking outside Carnegie Hall where Jascha Heifetz is performing, a middle-aged couple have an argument and walk out without using their tickets. Frankie grabs them and tries to sell them, but everyone at the concert hall has tickets already, so he decides to use them himself. Limey goes in with him because at first he thinks “Heifetz” is a stage magician who’s going to saw a woman in half, and when he realizes it’s a concert of classical music he walks out but Frankie is rapt and sits through Heifetz’ performance of Saint-Saens’ “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” with a look of awe. He goes back to the pawnbroker to reclaim his violin, but he runs afoul of the other kids in his gang who resent that he took the money back from the “treasury” to get back the violin. He also runs afoul of his stepfather, who, convinced that he stole the instrument, smashes it, chews poor Frankie out and throws him out of the home.

Frankie lives on the street for a few days until he stumbles across the Lawson School of Music and for the first time since the Heifetz concert hears the same kind of music. The school is hanging on barely, depending on whatever money its head (Walter Brennan in one of his with-teeth performances -- Brennan was fond of asking directors who’d never worked with him before, “Do you want it with or without?,” and when they inevitably asked, “With or without what?,” he’d say. “Teeth”) can scrape together. Professor Dawson has a daughter, Ann (Andrea Leeds), whose boyfriend Peter (Joel McCrea, who’s billed second even though he has precious little to do) has helped the school by arranging an extended loan of musical instruments from his prissy piss-and boss, music-store owner Mr. Flower (Porter Hall). The students are rehearsing for a concert of their entire orchestra (played by a real-life student orchestra from Los Angeles led by Peter Meremblum, and the film’s musical director, Alfred Newman, was smart to do that because the music we hear is good, but not so good that we think, “Oh, they hired professional studio musicians” and lose any hope of suspending disbelief), and the film is a race against time as to whether the Lawson students can perform their concert before Mr. Flower repossesses his instruments and the building’s owner throws them out for being six months behind on their rent. When Mr. Flower insists that he needs the instruments back because his store needs to turn a profit, and that Lawson should throw all the poor students out and admit only kids whose families can pay for their lessons, he’s drawn as such a cold-hearted villain for saying that, you’d probably be thinking, “What’s this? Did a Communist write this movie? Oh, yeah, one did.”

Hearing that the school is in financial trouble, Frankie decides to organize himself and some of the students into a string quartet and busk in front of Carnegie Hall again -- and of course they run into Jascha Heifetz, who over the objections of his manager promises to send to the school a film of himself performing and to give the school some unspecified help as soon as he returns to New York from his concert tour two months hence. The kids take that as a commitment from Heifetz to perform as the soloist at their big concert, and Peter convinces Flower and the other capitalists in the movie to hold off on closing down the school until the concert date -- only on the appointed date Flower calls Heifetz’ manager and finds Heifetz is playing somewhere else that night and won’t be performing at the Lawson school. So the bad guys schedule the eviction and dispossession during the concert -- only to be met with a phalanx of middle-aged women, most of them mothers of the members of the student orchestra, who refuse to let them in. Meanwhile, Frankie and Limey try to hunt down Heifetz but his manager won’t let them see the Great Man. Limey steals Heifetz’ “Stradivarius” violin, which a newspaper headline announces is worth $70,000 (today they go for between $2 and $10 million and they’re usually owned by syndicates who loan them out to actual musicians; the reason I put “Stradivarius” in quotes is that Heifetz preferred instruments by Stradivarius’s principal competitor then, Guarnerius del Jesu, and that’s the violin he’s shown playing in the film; also a direct descendant of the original Guarnerius, jazz pianist Johnny Guarnieri, was involved in the music scene as pianist for Artie Shaw’s band when this movie was made) and the police end up arresting Frankie, Peter and just about everyone else involved with the school.

Then Limey realizes he’s stolen Heifetz’ violin and returns it, but Frankie refuses to answer any questions about it until Heifetz comes to the police station to reclaim it. Then he’ll have a chance to ask Heifetz to perform at the concert -- which turns out to be an exciting race to the finish as the police arrive to confiscate Flower’s instruments during the concert and Peter shows up with Heifetz ready not only to perform as the concert soloist but to pledge ongoing financial support to the school. I’ve seen They Shall Have Music before but I liked it considerably better this time around, partly due to the class-conflict “edge” John Howard Lawson put into the script, partly due to the honesty Gene Reynolds brings to his performance as a slum kid for whom classical music comes to symbolize his desire for a better life than becoming a street thug, and partly due to the surprisingly dramatic and intense direction of the plot portions by the usually hacky Archie Mayo. Though Mayo directed the film’s dramatic portions and received sole credit, the sequences showing Heifetz performing were directed by William Wyler.

Like the movie Heifetz, the real Heifetz had a busy schedule filled with concert performances, and he had so little time available to make the movie that producer Goldwyn had to shoot him catch-as-catch-can and use Wyler because he was the contract director who happened to be available that week. Wyler goes to town on the concert scenes -- especially the middle one that’s supposed to be a film within the film, for which Heifetz performs “Hora Staccato.” The piece was originally for klezmer clarinet and piano and was written by Grigoras Dinicu; the violin transcription we hear here is by Heifetz himself, and in 1946 Benny Goodman made an intriguing record of it with his jazz band, augmented by strings, using the original instrument and playing the first two choruses as klezmer and the last one as jazz. Wyler films Heifetz from above, Heifetz from below, and at times shows us only Heifetz’ fret arm as he makes the rapid-fire changes in position required to perform this difficult music. Indeed, every time during a Heifetz performance where the directors cut away from him I found myself resenting it much the way I do watching the surviving films of Jimi Hendrix: what we want to see watching a movie of a virtuoso is what he did with his hands to produce those amazing sounds.

They Shall Have Music is actually a quite enjoyable film that mashes up various movie formulae quite well (oh, did I tell you Frankie sprains his foot while he’s chasing Heifetz down through the streets of New York?) and with some appealing performances by other cast members, including the young Diana Lynn (in her first film) playing a Chopin nocturne and a child soprano named Jacqueline Nash, who later pursued an adult career as pop singer Gale Sherwood, doing “Caro nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto (at which she’s surprisingly good despite a couple of flat high notes) and “Casta diva” from Bellini’s Norma (which she sings decently enough, though the whole idea of a child singing this aria is pretty preposterous: Gilda, the character in Rigoletto who sings “Caro nome,” is supposed to be a naive, overprotected teenage girl, but Norma is a mature woman who’s already had two kids!).