Till the Clouds Roll By (MGM, 1946)

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

Last Friday night at 9 p.m. I started a quite good – and quite long for 1946 – movie, Till the Clouds Roll By, an ostensible biopic of composer Jerome Kern. The year before Warner Bros. had done a big bio-musical of George Gershwin. Rhapsody in Blue (oddly in black-and-white; it was probably the last big-budget black-and-white musical ever made), and Warners decided to follow up with a biopic of Cole Porter, Night and Day, while MGM decided to green-light a project about Kern and have boy-next-door type Robert Walker play him. Kern was dead by the time the film was finished and released, but he’d been involved in the early stages and did an interview with the writer Guy Bolton – an old friend and frequent collaborator of Kern. (The final film credits Bolton with “story,” George Wells for “story adaptation” and Myles Connolly and Jean Holloway with the actual screenplay.) “If you tell the truth, it will be the dullest picture in the world,” Kern told Bolton.

“I then reminded him of one or two incidents that he had seemingly forgotten,” Bolton later recalled. “I reminded him of how he had planned to take the Lusitania with Charles Frohman – who so admired his talent – and only missed sailing because his alarm clock stopped in the night. [Frohman, played in the film by Harry Hayden, was one of those who died when the Lusitania was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat.] I talked of him meeting the girl he married when he heard her practicing scales and knocked on the door and asked if he could borrow her piano to take down the number that had come to him from somewhere.” (This would actually have made a better sequence than the one we get in the film, in which Kern is strolling through the British countryside – he’s gone to London to try to make a name for himself because at the time, at least according to this script, Broadway producers were interested only in songs by British composers. He walks through an unlocked door, seizes upon the piano in the front porch and is mistaken for a piano tuner by the lady of the house, whom he mistakes for a servant – there are a lot of mistaken-identity gags in the early part of this movie.)

The main fictionalization Bolton and his colleagues on the writing committee did was to invent a best friend for Kern, Jim Hassler (Van Heflin). Hassler is a top Broadway arranger who agrees to work on Kern’s songs even though he thinks Kern should abandon popular music and become a serious composer “like Brahms” – who, ironically, would be played by Robert Walker in a 1947 MGM film called Song of Love about Robert (Paul Henried) and Clara (Katharine Hepburn) Schumann. Hassler nurses the ambition to write a great symphony throughout the film but never gets around to it – he’s too busy arranging Kern’s songs and drinking – and he also has a daughter, Sally, played as an adorable child by Jean Wells and as a spoiled-brat adult by Lucille Bremer, whom Vincente Minnelli in an interview about another film described diplomatically as “a protégée of one of the studio bosses and quite unsuitable.”

The film opens at the Broadway premiere of Kern’s 1927 classic Show Boat – the musical that revolutionized the form and proved it could deal with serious issues like racism, alcoholism and gambling addiction – and contains a haunting prologue with some of the cast members performing Kern’s famous songs from that show, including Kathryn Grayson and Tony Martin doing “Make Believe” and Lena Horne giving us a scorching version of “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man.” That sequence is a glimpse of one of Hollywood’s most tantalizing might-have-beens: a Show Boat movie with an actual African-American, albeit a relatively light-skinned one, in the part of Julie Laverne, whose status as queen of the show boat and marriage to her leading man, Steve Baker (Bruce Cowling), are undone when she’s revealed as half-Black. MGM had bought the remake rights to Show Boat from Universal. Producer Arthur Freed wanted to do a version in which Lena Horne would play Julie, and used this film as a sort of screen test of her for that role. Only when he announced his plans to MGM’s marketing department, they went ballistic, pointing out that no movie theatre in the South would show a movie featuring an actual race-mixed marriage (even if the character’s race-mixed marriage was a major plot point of the story), so eventually Ava Gardner played Julie in the 1951 Show Boat film even though she needed “Egyptian Blend No. 5” makeup (which, ironically, had been invented during a short-lived attempt to pass off Lena Horne as a Mexican!) to look part-Black and also needed Annette Warren as a voice double for songs Horne could have sung superbly on her own.

As things turned out, the only actor in this Show Boat prologue who got to repeat their role in the complete film five years later was Kathryn Grayson, who according to one imdb.com “Trivia” poster was also “a protégée of one of the studio bosses.” Grayson was also dating Johnny Johnston, who was scheduled to appear in the film and shot three numbers with her, but when Grayson decided to marry Johnston the studio boss of whom she’d been a “protégée” had a jealous hissy-fit. By then Grayson herself was too big a star to be cut out of the film, but they took out all her numbers with Johnston and fired him after just one more MGM film. The film’s plot, to the extent it has one, details Kern’s rise to success and him writing one hit show after another until he’s broken-hearted by the death of Jim Hassler (a quite daring “bromance” for a 1946 movie) and only revived when Oscar Hammerstein II gives him a copy of Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat and, after he’s successfully tracked down Hassler’s daughter Sally – who walked out on a Kern musical when the song Kern wrote for her is taken away and given to Marilyn Miller (Judy Garland) for a big production number (sne and we are both solemnly told this is “for the good of the show” but it seems like a diva’s hissy-fit to me!), he walks down the Mississippi shore and he’s inspired to compose the songs for Show Boat.

Bremer, with Truty Erwin as her voice double, appears in that Memphis nightclub doing “I Won’t Dance” with Van Johnson, who had enough song-and-dance chops that he replaced Gene Kelly in the original Broadway run of the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey (though Hart was disgusted enough with the change that a friend remembered Hart telling him not to see the show because “Gene Kelly’s gone off to Hollywood and the guy they got to replace him is terrible”). They’re actually pretty good in “I Won’t Dance,” as is Bremer (or Erwin) in her big final number, “The Land Where the Good Songs Go,” a song that’s as preposterous as its title makes it sound. That’s part of a huge finale that features various cast members standing on a series of plinths as they belt out various Kern songs, culminating in Frank Sinatra, who otherwise isn’t in the mnovie at all, doing a truly odd version of “Ol’ Man River” that turns this ode to labor, pain and the promise of justice in the afterlife into an immaculate ballad sung by a white man in a white dinner suit with white jacket, tie and pants standing on a white plinth and introduced by a white drummer playing a white set of kettledrums.

James Agee, who reviewed the movie for The Nation in 1946 and acknowledged he’d always liked Kern’s “graceful, nacreous music” (according to online dictionaries, “nacreous” means “consisting of or resembling mother-of-pearl [or] having a play of lustrous rainbow colors”) but faulted the filmmakers for “the failure, twice around, to give ‘Ol’ Man River’ any of the pulse and momentum which go so far towards making it Kern’s best song. Both Sinatra and a colored singer [Caleb Peterson] do it, instead, with all misplaced reverence, as if they were retranslating at sight, out of Tacitus, the Emancipation Proclamation.” (My husband Charles actually liked Sinatra’s “Ol’ Man River,” particularly the way he bent and shaped the notes, which he attributed to the African-American musical tradition but I thought might also have come from the great opera singers of Sinatra’s own people. But then the definitive versions of “Ol’ Man River” as far as I’m concerned remain Paul Robeson’s and, in a different musical idiom, Ray Charles’.)

The main reason you’d want to see Till the Clouds Roll By is the various performances of Kern’s songs, which run the quality gamut from great to acceptable but never become as outright bad as, say, Perry Como’s rendition of “Mountain Greenery” in the MGM biopic of Rodgers and Hart, Words and Music. Thie highlights of the film are Judy Garland’s numbers, for which (at her insistence) MGM had the overall director, Richard Whorf (usually an actor, but he does an O.K. if not a spectacularly great job here) step aside and let her then-husband, Vincente Minnelli, take over. Minnelli had a big problem; at that moment Judy was pregnant with their daughter Liza (making Liza Minnelli one of those stars, along with Mia Farrow, who essentially made their screen debuts before they were born) and Vincente had to pull out all the tricks to keep that from the audience. On “Look for the Silver Lining” he stacked Judy in front of a sinkful of dishes she was supposedly washing, and on “Who?” – for which the singer had to do a spectacular dance number involving elephants, horses and other circus animals – he doubled her every chance he could. Judy was supposed to be playing the tragically short-lived Ziegfeld singing-dancing star Marilyn Miller, but when Miller’s own films got re-released on Turner Classic Movies it became clear that she and Garland weren’t at all alike. But who cares? Judy is brilliant in this film – she and Lena Horne are really the stars – it doesn’t matter that she’s playing someone she doesn’t resemble in the slightest.

Other highlights include Angela Lansbury playing a British music-hall entertainer singing Kern’s “How’d Ya Like to Spoon with Me?” (Lansbury continually fought the “suits” at MGM, who insisted on giving her voice doubles even though she had sung in British music halls and later would prove her vocal chops by starring in two huge Broadway hits, Mame and Sweeney Todd; I’d read elsewhere that she never got to sing for herself in an MGM movie in the 1940’s but the imdb.com “Trivia” posters insist that this time she did – and she repeated the song over 40 years later in a Murder, She Wrote episode); Virginia O’Brien’s “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” in the Show Boat prologue; June Allyson’s delivery of the novelty song “Cleopatterer”; the Wilde Twins’ (Lyn and Lee) doing “She Didn’t Say Yes”; and the young Cyd Charisse dancing to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (though the guy singing it is pretty sorry).

One song I found myself haunted by and was sorry was not performed vocally is “Go, LIttle Boat,” a piece Kern and P. G. Wodehouse wrote in 1919 and an utterly haunting ballad heard here as the exit music for Kern’s bromance partner, Jim Hessler. I just played this off YouTube in Joan Morris’s haunting rendition, with William Bolcom on piano (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L62nWGnp_Yw), and I was astonished not only by the beauty of Kern’s melody but Wodehouse’s lyrics as well. Here, for those of you (including me) who thought Wodehouse was only capable of upper-class satire and brittle wisecracks, are the lyrics (including the verse) to “Go, Little Boat”:

Soft, softly as over the waters we creep
Winds seem to sigh
Dark, dark is the night and the world is asleep
Wakeful and wide
Slow, slow though the river may flow
Soon, soon I shall be
Safe, safe in the harbor where someone I know
Waits for me.

Go, little boat, serenely gliding
Over the silver water, biding
Naught but the stars I see, shining above
Flow, river, carry me to him I love.

Go, little boat, serenely gliding
Love at your helm, your course is guiding
Fair winds to hasten you, may fortune send
’Til I come safe to journey’s end.

Gift of Gab (Universal, 1934)

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

Gift of Gab is a 1934 Universal comedy-musical about the radio business that’s been on the fringes of interest among horror-film fans because it’s the second of eight films both Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were in, and there is a famous still photo of Karloff and Lugosi playing chess that was supposedly from this film. Apparently their chess game was part of a longer scene that in some ways anticipated The Seventh Seal, as both of Universal’s great monster stars talked about death and created a genuinely sinister mood with their badinage. Alas, if such a scene were ever shot for this film it got left on the cutting-room floor, and as one imdb.com “Trivia” contributor noted, “When the film finally came to light, a vast disappointment was in store because not only are the two not seen together, Lugosi is wasted with a role literally of about five seconds’ duration. Karloff doesn't fare much better.” Lugosi is shown as a disembodied hand wielding a knife and then gets a five-second closeup as he gets to intone just one line (his spot is so short my husband Charles missed it) and Karloff is billed as “The Phantom” but only gets a few seconds climbing through an open window and delivering just one line of his own.

These occur as part of a sketch spoofing murder mysteries in which Paul Lukas, playing the murder victim but also getting one line just so we know he’s really alive, is just as wasted as Karloff and Lugosi are. Also missing from the final cut were little-person actor Billy Barty as the infant version of the lead character, Philip Gabney (Edmund Lowe), and Dick Elliott and Florence Enright as his parents. What’s left is a pretty ordinary revue-musical centered around the efforts of Phiiip Gabney to become a huge radio star after his previous racket, selling an alleged spot remover called “Spotto” (it removes the spot, all right, but also eats a hole in the cloth of the clothing it’s been applied to), gets broken up by police after a woman he’s tried it on, Barbara Kelton (Gloria Stuart), complains to the police and Gabney and his long-suffering sidekick, Patsy (Hugh O’Connell), high-tail it off the street corner and into the studios of radio station WGAB. (Writers Jerry Wald, Philip G. Epstein, Lou Breslow and Rian James make so many puns on the name “Gabney” – he says he has the “gift of gab,” he calls himself “The Great Gabney” and “The Even Greater Gabney” in honor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character and the 1929 film The Great Gabbo, respectively, and he even works for WGAB! – they get pretty tiresome after a while.)

Gabney gets his big break by befriending Col. Horatios Trivers (Victor Moore at his insufferably whiniest; he’d blessedly be off the screen for another two years until he turned up in RKO’s Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Swing Time and did his best to wreck it, though fortunately Fred, Ginger and songwriter Jerome Kern were too much for him). Trivers is the owner of a preposterous company called Trivers’ Canned Chicken Livers which needs all the help it can get from its radio ads, and delivered in the stentorian tones of Edmund Lowe both the ratings of Trivers’ radio hour and sales of canned chicken livers (why would anybody want canned chicken livers?) skyrocket. Alas, fame and the troubles of dealing with his woman program director, Barbara Kelton (that’s right: the same woman whose suit he ruined as a Spotto salesman!), unhinge Gabney and he becomes progressively more arrogant.

There were quite a few movies in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s about conceited entertainers who get their comeuppance, including Lord Byron of Broadway (MGM, 1929), in which a songwriter who’s ripped off the real-life traumas of the people around him for his songs (in the script that’s considered cheating; in the 1970’s it would be considered “sensitive”!) is abandoned by the no-good woman he left his nice girlfriend for and is redeemed by the nice girl’s love; Putin’ On the Ritz (United Artists, 1930), in which legendary entertainer Harry Richman plays an egomaniac who goes blind from adulterated bootleg booze (courtesy of the real-life chemical arms race between U.S. Prohibition agents, who insisted that industrial alcohol contain poisons to render it undrinkable; and the bootleggers, who had to figure chemical ways to get the adulterants out) and is nursed back to health (though he still can’t see) by his girlfriend; Young Man of Manhattan (Paramount, 1930), in which yet another good man – a sportswriter this time – is ruined by a bad girl (Ginger Rogers, in her first film) and salvaged by a good one after she goes nearly blind from another batch of bootleg booze and he has to fund the treatment that enables her to see again; Crooner (Warner Bros., 1932), with David Manners as a singer with almost no voice (his megaphone amplifies him to audibility) is once again torn between a good girl and a bad girl, but whose comeuppance comes when he punches out a heckler in his audience and the guy turns out to be a disabled veteran; and this one, in which Gabney progressively alienates everyone around him until his comeuppance.

Said comeuppance arrives when he’s sent out to a New York airfield to cover the arrival of a British pilot who’s completing his transatlantic flight – only he’s too lazy to go. Instead he stays at the WGAB studio and broadcasts a fake interview with the pilot (and Sterling Holloway, uncredited, providing the imitations of airplane noises in his role as the station’s sound-effects man) from the studio, then learns that the real pilot crashed and was killed in Connecticut. Gabney gets the chance to reform himself courtesy of another plane crash, this time in the hills of upstate New York, where he mounts a daring parachute jump to get to eight stranded crew members and passengers of a flight that crashed, does a broadcast on the spot and signals the search planes where they can look for the passengers and rescue them. (There’s a brief shot of an autogiro – an odd combination of an airplane and a helicopter that had a short-lived vogue in the early 1930’s and whose most famous film appearance was probably as W. C. Fields’ aircraft in International House – but when Gabney finally takes his flight to broadcast and rescue the passengers he’s in a two-seat biplane, a much less practical aircraft for the purpose.)

What saves this movie and gives it most of its remaining interest are the musical guest stars, including Ethel Waters (in superb form as she sings a song called “I Ain’t Gonna Sin No More” backed by a quartet of Mills Brothers wanna-bes called the Beale Street Boys; the song eerily foretells Waters’ eventually becoming a born-again Christian and giving up secular music to be a regular guest at the Billy Graham Crusades), Ruth Etting (in nice if not particularly distinguished songs called “Thinking to Myself” and “Tomorrow, Who Cares?,” Gene Austin (who in 1927 had recorded Walter Donaldson’s “My Blue Heaven” and had the biggest-selling record of anything until Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” 15 years later, but he was on the downgrade by 1934 and his song here, “Blue Sky Avenue,” is hardly “My Blue Heaven”) and an O.K. group called the Downey Sisters who are hardly in the same league as the Boswell Sisters before them or the Andrews Sisters afterwards, but they’ll do.

Oddly, the director of Gift of Gab, Karl Freund, is also better known for horror films than movies like this: he was the cinematographer on the 1930 Dracula and director of The Mummy and Mad Love. and when he returned to comedy it was in the early 1950’s as director of photography for the I Love Lucy TV series. Despite the credentials both before and behind the cameras, Gift of Gab is a pretty ordinary movie for its time and no great shakes now – especially not in the form Charles and I saw it, dubbed from a VHS tape onto DVD from a grey-label source and with a nasty buzzing through the soundtrack. The problem was the VHS machine they were dubbing it from had an automatic tracking control, and those controls were set to make sure the picture looked right no matter what that did to the sound. I had the same problem back in the days of VHS trying to dub clean copies of songs from the soundtracks of VHS tapes, so I knew what was wrong with this copy right away!

Argentine Nights (Universal, 1940)

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

Argentine Nights was the first film made by the rambunctious comedy team the Ritz Brothers (their family name was Joachim but they got “Ritz” from the cracker) at Universal Pictures after they’d closed out their 20th Century-Fox contract due to disputes over the quality of their films – though they ended up at Universal doing a series of hour-long “B”’s that even their lesser Fox efforts look like Gone With the Wind by comparison. Argentine Nights wasn’t a “B”” it was an estimable film running 84 minutes and was Universal’s attempt to respond to the call for films set in Latin America Franklin Roosevelt’s administration had issued to Hollywood to back up his “Good Neighbor Policy.” Argentine Nights also seems to have been Universal’s attempt to get ahead of 20th Century-Fox’s big-budget extravaganza Down Argentine Way, which co-starred Don Ameche and Betty Grable (who got the part at the last minute when Alice Faye dropped out and finally achieved stardom after a decade of being kicked around Hollywood) and featured the American film debut of the so-called “Brazilian Bombshell,” Carmen Miranda.

Universal released Argentine Nights on September 6, 1940, five weeks before the release of Down Argentine Way on October 11, and it seems like the seven writers (five credited, two not) on Argentine Nights – J. Robert Bren, Gladys Atwater, Arthur T. Horman, Ray Golden, Sid Kuller, Olive Connor and Paul Gerard Smith – either got a peek at what their confrères at Fox (Rian James, Ralph Spence, Darrell James and future 1959 Ben-Hur screenwriter Karl Tunberg) were doing, or they were withdrawing from the same cliché bank. Argentine Nights begins with a sequence worthy of the Marx Brothers or W. C. Fields: the shareholders of a company called “Colossal Ideas, Inc.” are assembled for their annual meeting (which features delegates from each state under a standard with their state’s name, which makes it look more like a political convention than a shareholders’ meeting) and are waiting for the company’s board of directors to fly in. Only the board consists of the Ritz Brothers, and they’re a lot more skilled at separating their investors from their money than in actually earning a return on investments (sort of like the Trump Organization).

The Ritzes have a solution: they declare bankruptcy (they even get to sing an ode to “Chapter 77B,” the operative bankruptcy law at the time – today it’s called Chapter 11) and take the two assets they have, the Andrews Sisters and an all-woman band led by Bonnie Brooks (Constance Moore), to Argentina, where they have an offer to perform at the New Mañana Hotel in Buenos Aires. Only the “new” Mañana Hotel was just a con worked on an elderly Argentine couple, Señor and Señora Viejas (Paul Porcasi and Ferike Boros), by a schemer who presented plans for such an edifice and got the Viejases to give him a thousand head of cattle (this is Argentina, remember?) which he said he would sell for them to raise the capital to build the New Mañana. Only, of course, he kept the money for himself and left them with the Old Mañana (a tiny little resort well off the beaten path of Buenos Aires) and one milking cow. Many of the best gags in Argentine Nights take place on the trip to Argentina, which the Andrews Sisters and Bonnie’s band take as steerage passengers and on which the Ritz Brothers stow away (and recycle as many of the gags as their writers dared from the Marx Brothers’ two stowaway movies, Monkey Business and A Night at the Opera) until the Andrewses, the Ritzes and the band members hit on the idea of locking up the ship’s own (all-male) orchestra so the captain has to give them all first-class cabins and six meals a day so Bonnie’s band will play at the ship’s nightly dance.

They make it to Argentina and clamber aboard what they don’t realize is a tour bus – so they get led around all the sights of Buenos Aires (at least the ones Universal had stock footage of) before they end up at the Old Mañana. Meanwhile, the women in the cast have met a whole bunch of more or less hunky Argentine men, and Bonnie has attracted the attentions of Edoardo (future Superman George Reeves, who despite all the black goop in his hair and the little moustache to make him look Latino comes off like we’re in an alternate version of the Superman myth in which baby Kal-El’s rocket landed in Argentina). Edoardo is sort of the Don Ameche character in this film; he’s a star athlete (albeit in polo instead of horse racing) and he’s looking for a spot to host the welcome-home party after the Argentinian polo team won the world’s championship. (Well, you’re kind of hard to beat if your team captain is Superman.) Only, in order to build up the mystique of the Old Mañana, the Viejases tell the Ritzes and the girls that the place is surrounded by bandits, including the most notorious one of all, “El Tigre,” and George Reeves (or maybe a voice double) sings a song while leading his bandit horde (really his polo team) on horseback and suddenly it seems like we’re in a Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movie.

Eventually the Old Mañana’s opening is a success, Edoardo gets Bonnie, the other polo players get the members of Bonnie’s band and the Andrews Sisters are stuck with the Ritz Brothers – who in an oddly Laurel-and-Hardyesque finish go out to collect the phony “Detour” signs they set up to steer people to the Old Mañana, only there’s a real sign with the word “PELIGRO” on it (which, of course, the Ritzes don’t understand) warning that the bridge is out. The Ritzes don’t realize there isn’t a bridge anymore and in a neat special-effects shot they end up suspended in mid-air where the bridge used to be – only once they realize the bridge is out, they fall into the river below and make a big splash as the end title comes up. Argentine Nights is a perfectly reasonable 84 minutes’ worth of screen entertainment, with no fewer than 10 songs crammed into its running time, most of them sung by the Andrews Sisters – who made their film debut here and got to sing one of their biggest hits, “Rhumboogie,” a typical Don Raye-Gene De Paul novelty mashing together two then-current dance crazes, the rhumba and the boogie-woogie. (It’s one of my favorite songs from the period and I have three records of it – the Andrews Sisters’ own, one by Gene Krupa’s band with Irene Daye on vocal, and one by Bob Zurke’s band with Evelyn Poe on vocal.)

“Rhumboogie” is heard here twice, once by the Andrews Sisters at the Colossal Ideas convention and once later on board ship lip-synched by the Ritz Brothers in drag to the Andrews’ record (another rip-off from the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business, as well as an eerie anticipation of the undoing of Milli Vanilli: the record slows down, speeds up and ultimately gets stuck as the Ritzes try to mime to it). The company gets an even sillier dance match-up, “Brooklynonga,” by Sid Kuller, Ray Golden and Hal Borne (Borne was usually Fred Astaire’s rehearsal pianist and they wrote a few songs together), which appears as the final number at the Old Mañana and in which the Andrews Sisters have so much grotesque makeup slathered on their faces I briefly wondered whether these, too, were the Ritz Brothers in drag..Years ago I remember reading an interview with an Andrews Sister (I can’t remember which one) in which she complained about what Universal’s legendary make-up artist Jack P. Pierce had done to them in this movie, and when the interviewer pointed out that Pierce had created the Frankenstein Monster, the Mummy, the Wolf-Man and all the other makeups for Universal’s famous horror films, Ms. Andrews said, “Well, he may have been great for Boris Karloff, but he was lousy for us!” Seeing how grotesque they look in this final sequence, I can see why she was complaining.

Argentine Nights is as derivative as all get-out, and one can see why the Ritz Brothers don’t have the modern-day fan base the Marx Brothers do – my husband Charles once joked that the Ritzes seemed like a bizarre attempt to hybridize the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, and I replied that one problem with the Ritz Brothers is that, unlike the Marxes or the Stooges (two of whom were brothers), they didn’t really create identifiable characters: one could watch a Ritz Brothers movie and, unless one of them addresses another by name, not know for the life of you which Ritz is which. Argentine Nights is hardly a patch on Down Argentine Way, which has the advantages of color, bigger star names in the romantic leads (Don Ameche and Betty Grable may be far from the greatest actors of all time, but they sure outdo George Reeves and Constance Moore), a lavish production, a dazzling star turn by the Nicholas Brothers and, above all, Carmen Miranda. (Later in the 1940’s Universal would try to duplicate Carmen Miranda’s appeal by signing her younger sister Aurora.) But it’s a fun movie and hardly as embarrassing as some of the Ritzes’ later Universal credits.

Beware of the Midwife (Fireside Pictures. Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night I watched another Lifetime “premiere,” a movie called Beware of the Midwife (a title which, at least for me, came too close to “Beware of the Blob!” to avoid risibility) which differed from previous Lifetime movies about the “perfect” teacher/nanny/wife/husband/stepfather/stepmother/guidance counselor/golf caddy/whatever who turns out to be a psycho bitch (regardless of her, his or its gender) getting the nice young leads in trouble only in that both the Midwife from Hell and the not-so-young couple she victimizes are Black. I suppose it’s an example of progress in race relations that now African-American actors have equal access to these clichés (though I remember saying that as long ago as 1996 about Will Smith’s role in Independence Day). Sarah McClain (Mouna Troaré) and her husband Kevin (Michael Xavier) are finally about to have their first child after years of trying (including vary ing their sexual positions in an attempt to make conception more likely, described oddly clinically in John F. Hayes’ script), only she’s beginning to have her doubts as to whether Western medicine in general and her obstetrician, Dr. Dervaux (Tanya Clarke – the character is listed as “Dr. Hughes” on the imdb.com page for the film but I’m pretty sure I heard something French-sounding beginning with “D”), in particular.

When there’s an accident at the St. Paul’s Hospital maternity ward and a woman loses her baby as a result, Sarah determines to seek the services of a midwife and finds one in Rose (Raven Dauda), who comes to the McClains’ home with an adult daughter, Anne (Bukola Walfall), who assists her. She also starts bossing the McClains around, giving them a strict regimen of diet and exercise and showing up at their house unannounced to make sure they’re sticking to it. Kevin is uncertain about entrusting the birth of his child – a daughter they’ve already named Mary – to someone outside the medical establishment, and he’s put off by Rose’s evasive answer when he asks her what will happen in case there’s an emergency. (I’ve learned enough about midwifery – from interviewing a midwife as well as a woman who used one – to know that a certified nurse-midwife is required to have a hospital contact so the medical establishment can take over in case the mother-to-be has an emergency that can’t be handled at home, so this is something that should have made the McClains more suspicious than they were.) Eventually Sarah has her child but suffers so severe a loss of blood that Kevin tries to get her to agree to be taken to the hospital – but eventually the baby comes out and Sarah seems to recover O.K.

Only if you think the McClains have seen the last of that pesky midwife, you’ve got another think coming. Rose shows up about a week after Mary’s birth and has a hissy-fit when she sees Sarah feeding him formula instead of breast milk, and at one point she steals a spare set of keys from a key rack helpfully labeled “KEYS” so she can let herself into the McClains’ home at any time. Writer Hayes has already dropped a big hint about her motive for her obsession with the McCiains’ baby – she’s chewed out her own daughter for not being able to get pregnant despite spending thousands of dollars on fertility treatments (though one wonders how Anne could get pregnant since we see no evidence that she’s either married or in a sexual relationship with a man), and it’s something of a twist on the usual Lifetime formula that this woman is obsessed with Mary because of her thwarted desire for a grandchild. The climax kicks off when Rose uses her keys to let herself into the McClain home at night and kidnap Mary, after first chloroforming Kevin and Sarah so she won’t wake them up and they won’t hear the baby crying. She plants her tube of chloroform in the McClains’ car so Kevin will be suspected of kidnapping his own daughter – and the cops totally buy it and hold Kevin for the crime until the good blonde white pediatrician who’s still maintained an interest in Sarah’s and the baby’s care does the sort of due diligence the McClains should have.

She doesn’t find Rose’s name in the registry of licensed midwives and she ultimately discovers video footage of her in the hospital trying to steal someone else’s baby – she was stopped by hospital security but they didn’t either detain her or report her to the police. Rose has decided to take herself and baby Mary to Tampa Bay, Florida and raise Mary as her own, and when Rose’s own daughter Anne tries to stop her Rose knocks out Anne with an injection and ties her up at home so she can’t stop her – though Anne was able to hide Rose’s bus tickets so when she arrives at the bus station she has to buy new ones, and that gives the McClains and the police time to catch up to her. Sarah and Rose have the typical big fight-to-the-finish after Rose pulls a gun on Sarah but Sarah is somehow able to knock it out of her hand, and eventually Sarah reaches for the gun and it’s not quite clear what happens after that, but apparently Rose dies (I had thought the writer might really twist the knife in and have an accidental shot go wild and kill baby Mary, but a tragic ending like that would definitely not be in the Lifetime formula), the McClains get back their baby and all is presumably right with their world.

Beware of the Midwife is an all too typical Lifetime movie, timidly going where hundreds of its predecessors have gone before, directed pretty much on autopilot by Max McGuire and decently if not spectacularly acted. One problem with the movie is that the actresses playing Rose and Sarah look so much alike – both stocky and with very dark skin even by African-American standards – it’s not easy to tell who is who in the climactic fight scene. It’s a typical Lifetime movie done with a Black cast – though at least the people in Beware of the Midwife live and work in a world that contains white people (unlike the ones in Lust, who seemed to be living in the same hermetically sealed all-Black world as the characters in the 1930’s “race movies”) and there’s a subtle hint that in deciding to give birth with a Black midwife instead of a white doctor Sarah is expressing a sort of racial pride.

The Falcon Takes Over (RKO, 1942)

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

After Beware of the Midwife I ran Charles a quirky film I’ve long had an affection for: The Falcon Takes Over, third entry in RKO’s series of “The Falcon” detective films and the first movie ever made from a story by Raymond Chandler. Though he’d been living and working in the Los Angeles area for decades, first as an oil company executive and then as a writer, Chandler was pretty naïve about the movie business and when RKO and 20th Century-Fox came a-calling with offers for the movie rights to two of his books, Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window, he took them even though they were low-ball deals and the studios involved had no intention of filming them with his detective lead, Philip Marlowe. Instead RKO bought Farewell, My Lovely for the Falcon series and Fox bought The High Window to make it into Time to Kill, the seventh and last in their series of murder mysteries featuring Brett Halliday’s detective character Michael Shayne. (Once what’s now known as film noir became a “thing” later in the 1940’s both RKO and Fox would remake their Cnandler properties with Marlowe as a character, RKO brilliantly in the 1944 film noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet and Fox in a rather tacky film called The Brasher Doubloon, after the rare 18th century American coin that’s both stolen and counterfeited in the story.)

From this pedigree one would expect The Falcon Takes Over to be a schizoid movie, half camp comedy-mystery and half film noir, and that’s pretty much what we get. The opening scene takes place at the exclusive “Club 13” – a nightspot so ritzy the patrons are required to wear evening dress – which used to be a dive called “Florian’s” where wrestler and small-time thug Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) used to hang out because he was dating a girl named Velma who had a small part in the club’s floor show. The moment Moose crashes into the joint – we’re told later he got a 20-year sentence for manslaughter but escaped after five – we get the sense that the noir world is gate-crashing the world of polite upper-class mysteries like the Falcon films generally. Moose crashes through the club crowd, strong-arming anyone who tries to stop him and murdering the club’s owner, Montgomery, when the poor guy won’t tell him where Velma now is. To make his getaway Moose car-jacks Jonathon “Goldie” Locke (Allan Jenkins), sidekick of socialite and amateur detective Gay Laurence, a.k.a. “The Falcon” (George Sanders), and has Goldie drop him off at the home of Jessie Florian (Anne Revere, who plays the character more hard-boiled and less dissolute than in Chandler’s novel or in Murder, My Sweet). Laurence traces Goldie to Florian’s home and sees her make a phone call alerting someone – we don’t yet know whom – that Moose is out and posing a danger to various criminals, including Laird Burnett (Selmer Jackson), who runs a fancy nightclub (in Chandler’s novel it was a floating casino, one of the gambling boats that in Chandler’s day were anchored off the coast of Los Angeles just past the three-mile limit so they’d at least technically be legal) and has organized a gang of jewel thieves that includes Marriott (Hans Conried, who also had a small role as a police technician in the first Falcon film, The Gay Falcon).

Marriott hires the Falcon to pay some money to crooks who stole a valuable jade necklace from his friend, socialite Diana Kenyon (Helen Gilbert), to buy it back from them – but he shoots the Falcon in the back at the drop point (fortunately the Falcon anticipated a double-cross and loaded the gun with blanks) and then gets shot himself for real. The Falcon is rescued by aspiring reporter Anne Riordan (Lynn Bari, playing a good girl for a change), who wants to work with him on the case because she figures if she solves it and writes an article she’ll be able to get a permanent job on any paper in town. Eventually Burnett is busted and Diana Kenyon is revealed as Moose’s old girlfriend Velma; though she didn’t marry a hapless sugar daddy the way she did in Chandler’s novel and the two other films of it, nonetheless she rose out of the gutter and into affluence and social position, but at the cost of having to pay regular blackmail money to Burnett and Florian. There’s the usual trick ending of the Falcon films, in which Laurence breaks his previous engagement and seems altar-bound to Anne Riordan when a whole troupe of burlesque performers show up at the police station – the cops raided the joint – and their leader pleads for help, and of course the Falcon is always a sucker for a pretty woman …

The Falcon Takes Over is actually quite a good film, ably adapted from Chandler’s typically convoluted original by Frank Fenton and Lynn Root and atmospherically directed by Irving Reis. The cinematographer was George Robinson, borrowed from Universal (where he was about to shoot the beautifully atmospheric Son of Dracula) and creating some vivid noir atmospherics in the parts of the story that call for them. As William K. Everson noted in his book The Detective in Film, “Some of Philip Marlowe’s integrity even seemed to rub off on the superficial Falcon.” It’s a movie that seems in a lot of ways to sum up the effect World War II and its aftermath would have on how Hollywood approached crime films, turning away from the campy badinage of all those 1930’s films that combined murder mystery and screwball comedy and towards the grittier, more serious version of the underworld, complete with dark shadows and chiaroscuro camerawork, that became film noir. It’s also an interesting tribute to George Sanders as an actor that he could transcend his usual flippancy and dig into a part that offered him room for an in-depth portrayal; in a way it’s a warm-up for his role in Douglas Sirk’s fine, underrated Lured five years later, in which he finds himself the principal suspect in a series of sex-related killings and loses his fabled sang-froid as he realizes what’s happening to him (and his performance is matched by Lucille Ball’s as the woman, roommate of one of the victims, engaged by the police as a decoy to find the killer) and once again makes it seem regrettable that Sanders never got to play Sherlock Holmes. He would have been near-ideal for the role, but Sanders’ commercial and artistic peak came at a time (the late 1930’s and early 1940’s) when Basil Rathbone owned the role of Holmes on screen!

Deadly Dating Game (Dawn’s Light, Bandit Media Capital, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Yesterday afternoon I looked up the Lifetime network schedule and found that at 2 p.m. they were showing a movie I was interested in which I had missed on its first go-round: Deadly Dating Game (originally filmed under the working title Deadly Radio Romance, which would have more accurately reflected just what the movie was about). It starts with a deliberately deceptive prologue which we learn only several acts later took place in New York City: a young Black man named Gavin Newman (Ivan Edwards) is out in a park with a young Black woman. They’re talking about how both of them have recently been through romantic breakups and ultimately decide they’re still not sufficiently healed from the wounds of their past relationships to start a new one. Then the woman takes a fall from a cement landing and hits her head on a pipe, killing her, and director Mike Hoy (working from a script by Kelly Peters and Amy Katherine Taylor – so once again we have a script written by women but directed by a man) cuts the sequence to make it look like Gavin murdered her.

The show then cuts to its main location, Austin, Texas, where Gavin’s ex, Shannon Baker (Skye Coyne), hosts a morning program on radio station KQAX (98.6 FM – did Peters and Taylor deliberately give it a frequency that sounds like the normal human body temperature?) that’s a mix of call-in, guest interviews, Shannon speaking and occasionally playing romantic records to give her listeners information that will help their love lives. With her own love life a mess – she hasn’t had a boyfriend since Gavin quit his job at KQAX, went to New York City and broke up with her – she accepts the suggestion of her assistant Hailey Michaels (Jillian Murray) that she broadcast about her need for a man and invite her listeners to call in with suggestions as to whom she should date next. With a premise like that I would have expected that she’d go on several dates with various men she’s been matched with by her callers, one of them would turn out to be a stalker, and the suspense would be over which one – while she and Gavin would end up working together to solve the mystery and in the process would re-fall in love and end up together again.

Gavin does indeed turn up in Austin, explaining that his New York job didn’t work out but a rival Austin station made him an offer and enabled him to return, only he shows up at so many of his and Shannon’s old haunts she becomes convinced that he’s stalking her. Shannon also has another, more obvious stalker, a nerdy young man who brings her blue-frosted cupcakes because at one point on her show she said she liked them, and he’s so obviously creepy we’re clearly meant to view him as a red herring. After a week of dealing with losers Shannon actually goes out with someone who seems at least a possible long-term partner, a doctor named Ian (Nick Caldwell). Their first date is a disaster because he keeps getting work calls on his cell phone to which he has to respond, but the two like each other enough that they make arrangements to see each other again. They have a dinner date that gets disrupted by the sudden appearance of Gavin, but they agree to a third date as long as it doesn’t involve food consumption. Ian says one of his favorite bands is playing a club date, but before they can meet up for that he comes to Shannon’s place to meet up with her – and is murdered by the typical Lifetime killer in a hoodie (a gimmick Lifetime has been using a lot lately so neither the victim nor the audience can tell the gender of the killer).

Ian’s body is dragged away from her home but she still has enough of a connection with the victim that Shannon is interviewed by the woman police detective investigating the case. Shannon does her program in the company of two people, Hailey and Jayden (Kelsey Shryer) – a male, despite the feminine-sounding names of both the character and the actor playing him – whom I thought would turn out either to be Gay (I half-expected him to tell Shannon either “My boyfriend swings both ways” or “My boyfriend has a straight brother”) or to be the stalker-killer himself, acting out of an unrequited crush on Shannon (and though for most of the movie Kelsey Shryer is sitting behind a desk and seemingly serving no function, he gets up in one scene and we get to see both a nice basket and a nice ass). They’re supposed to be assisting her in the show but it’s not clear what either of them do – one would think one of them would be her call screener, but if so they’re doing a lousy job because they’re letting her stalker(s) get on-air time with her any time they choose.

What’s more, as soon as they realize the stalker is calling they cut him off – the logical thing would seem to have been to have Shannon keep the guy talking and call 911 on a different phone to ask the police to trace the call – but this is a script that is full of lapses of logic like that. As she gets more stalking calls Shannon insists on continuing her broadcasts from the KQAX studio instead of using any of the opportunities modern technology would offer – like re-running previous segments, pre-recording the show or doing it remotely – thereby making herself a sitting duck for whoever is out to get her. At least part of Shannon’s reluctance either to take a vacation or to do her show in a different way comes from the fact that her producer/boss Franklyn Jones (Maurice Whitfield) has got her a nomination for Austin’s Broadcaster of the Year award, and this would be a major publicity boost for her and KQAX. The cops manage to clear Gavin because he has an alibi for Ian’s murder, and this brings him and Shannon back together. Then Shannon and Franklyn are having dinner at Shannon’s house, only someone sends them a bottle of wine which turns out to be poisoned; Franklyn drinks the spiked wine and gets violently ill, though he survives.

Eventually the culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Hailey Michaels – whom my husband Charles had pegged as early as the second act (though I misunderstood him and thought he was going along with my suspicion that it would turn out to be Jayden, partly on the idea that the writers were setting him up to have an only-woman-who-can-turn-me-straight crush on Shannon and partly on the mystery convention that the character who seems to have no other reason to be there turns out to be the killer) – though as Peters and Taylor started dropping hints in her direction I still guessed wrong about her motive. I thought it was professional jealousy – Hailey had made it clear she wanted an on-air show of her own at KQAX and she targets Franklyn after he decides not to give her an open slot – but it turns out the real reason was she was in love with Gavin herself. The prologue turns out to be Hailey having gone to New York to chase after Gavin, seeing him with another woman, killing her and then returning to Austin, hoping that his breakup with Shannon will be permanent and she can get Gavin on the rebound. This doesn’t really explain why she would kill Ian – one would think if she were after Shannon’s ex she’d want her seriously involved with another man – but eventually the police figure it all out, rescue Shannon from a fight-to-the-death with Hailey, and as the show ends Shannon announces her reunion with Gavin on the air while Hailey is in a prison mental ward talking like she’s doing a radio show. (Oh, St. Alfred Hitchcock, you have a lot to answer for for showing Norman Bates in a strait-jacket talking to himself at the end of Psycho! Too many lesser talents have copied a gimmick you did superbly and they do ineptly.)

I think Charles summed it up when – after having fly-specked Deadly Dating Game with comments, mostly on the plot holes and general improbability – he said it wasn’t an especially bad Lifetime movie but not an especially good one either. Aside from the plot improbabilities, the main problem with Deadly Dating Game was the casting: Skye Coyne and Jillian Murray look so much alike that it’s often hard to tell them apart, especially during their climactic fight scene. Also, Ivan Evans as Gavin is O.K.-looking but not particularly exciting either physically or as a personality, and he and Skye Coyne are simply unbelievable as a couple – not because he’s Black and she’s white (it’s a matter of what little racial progress we’ve made in this country that that seems much less remarkable than it used to, and it’s not at all an issue in the plot) but because there’s zero chemistry between them. Frankly, if the writers wanted Shannon to have a Black boyfriend, they should have had her end up with her boss Franklyn; Maurice Whitfield, though visibly older than Ivan Evans, is far sexier and more charismatic. Aside from the plot and casting glitches, Deadly Dating Game is probably as good as one could expect a Lifetime movie to be – aside from the few, like Restless Virgins, that have actually grabbed issues of race, sex and class and done exciting, vibrant things with them – and it certainly delivers what Maureen Dowd called the “pussy in peril” Lifetime formula even though this time the pussy is in peril from another pussy!

Lust (T. D. Jakes Productions, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Actually Deadly Dating Game looked like a masterpiece by comparison with the other Lifetime movie Charles and I watched last night, a much-ballyhooed “Premiere” of a film called Lust: A Seven Deadly Sins Story. Charles and I have been joking about this title all week, with me saying, “Of course they were going to start out with Lust! They wouldn’t make the first one Gluttony!”, and Charles replying by listing several non-deadly sins, including consecrating a bishop without authority from the Pope, that would make even more boring movies than Gluttony. (But then I remember – though I never saw – an early-1970’s foreign film called Le Grand Bouffe that was about a group of 1-percenters holding a super-banquet and literally eating themselves to death, so maybe the Gluttony movie has already been made.)

Lust was based on the first in a series of “inspirational” books about the seven deadly sins by Black author Victoria Christopher Murray, who according to her publisher (Simon & Schuster) has won an NAACP Image Award, perhaps for writing books about Black one-percenters in Atlanta, Georgia and thereby letting white America know that there are Black one-percenters. (Then again Lifetime has already aired Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta, an unusually good movie that did a quite inventive and generally credible job of transmuting Jane Austen’s classic into a tale of Black one-percenters in Atlanta.) According to a Web page put up by her publisher, Simon & Schuster (https://www.simonandschuster.com/series/The-Seven-Deadly-Sins). Murray is working on a series of novels dealing with all seven of the deadly sins as they’re expressed by rich Black Atlanteans but so far she’s just published four: Lust, Envy, Greed and Wrath. Lifetime has so far filmed at least two of them, Lust and Envy (they’re premiering Envy next week), and they’re heavily promoting them.

I wanted to see Lust partly because of the lubricious potential of the subject and partly because of all the scenes in Lifetime’s promo of the two Black male leads, Tobias Truvillion and Durrell “Tank” Babbs, going shirtless. I was looking forward to plenty of soft-core porn of both these hot men having at the female lead, Keri Hilson. Alas, Murray’s book, as adapted here (so far the imdb.com page on this is just a “stub” and doesn’t list director or writers), carefully avoids anything lubricious or, indeed, anything particularly exciting non-sexually either. The plot: Tiffany (Keri Hilson) is getting cold feet about her upcoming marriage to Damon King (Tobias Truvillion), well-to-do Black entrepreneur (who lives in a giant house whose exterior has been used before by several Lifetime producers as a residence of both Black and white characters). She met him when she went to work for him in one of his companies and they started dating. He moved her into his giant palace of a house and they’ve been having sex, but she finds it less than satisfying and wonders if she’d enjoy it more with another man.

The other man turns out to be Damon’s half-brother Trey King (Durrell “Tank” Tubbs), who’s just been released for prison after a seven-year bid for a crime carefully left unspecified, and who’s out to seduce Tiffany almost from the moment they meet. Only it takes forever for the two of them to get anywhere near the bedroom – for most of the movie they’re just doing suggestive things like him kissing her neck and her anointing him with lavender oil. The rest of the plot, to the extent this film has one, is Tiffany trying to open her own spa and fighting off the attempts of Damon to help her – he’s got all these successful businesses but she wants to show him she can succeed on her own – and when the wiring in the building she’s rented for the spa turns out to be substandard, Trey offers to rewire it for free and charge her only the cost of the materials. Damon doesn’t want her to take Trey on his offer, but she does and that gives him the opportunity to hang out at her workplace and give her smoldering looks.

Every so often Tiffany gives us a voice-over narration explaining how the as yet unconsummated affair with Trey is wrecking her life and making her feel miserable about herself, until on the eve of her wedding to Damon she slips out of the house and goes to the hotel where she and Damon are supposed to spend their wedding night to meet Trey for what she hopes is going to be a hot night having soul-shattering sex with the ex-con stud. Only [spoiler alert!] instead of giving her the thrilling time she was expecting, Trey rejects her and says he only wanted to seduce her to get back at Damon because (as we’ve begun to suspect several acts before) the crime for which he was sent to prison was one he and Damon committed together, only Damon escaped and used the proceeds from whatever it was as seed capital to launch his “legitimate” businesses, while Trey became Damon’s fall guy and rotted in prison for seven years. Then, in a bizarre twist that in some ways is the best part of the movie even though neither Murray nor her adapters are able to make it the slightest bit credible, Damon reverts to his thug origins, pulls out a gun, puts on a watch cap and other “gangsta” attire, and sets out to kill the man who seduced his wife, and when he realizes it’s his half-brother (they had the same father but different mothers) the two have a fight before Damon pulls back and says he’ll leave Trey alone if Trey gets out of Atlanta and never comes back.

Damon throws Tiffany out of his house and she goes to stay with her grandparents, who raised her – they’re both good God-fearing Christians and, indeed, her granddad is the minister who was supposed to perform her wedding – and eventually she and Damon get back together, but only after a year or so and only on condition that they not have sex with each other until they’re actually married. They do that, and in the end we see them not only together but Tiffany legitimately pregnant – thereby communicating the anti-sex message of mainstream Christianity that sex isn’t supposed to be fun: it’s only supposed to happen between married heterosexuals and only for purposes of reproduction. If the makers of Lust had deliberately set out to make as boring a film as possible with that salacious title, they succeeded big-time: Charles wondered why the writers were taking so long to get Trey and Tiffany into the bedroom together for the hot extra-relational sex scene we were both anticipating, and I was recalling Arturo Toscanini’s comment about the length of the second act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in which Wagner took so long to get his adulterous lovers together Toscanini joked, “If they’d been Italians they’d have already had seven kids by now!”

As someone who was wanting to see lots of hot soft-core action and an example of Lifetime’s typical good-clean dirty fun, Lust was even more disappointing than it was to Charles – who wasn’t expecting much – and it didn’t help that none of the three leads were particularly appealing. Tiffany’s self-pity and apparent helplessness got old and boring after a while – the way the story was constructed she got all the pain and remorse from her lust without actually having the fun part – while Damon comes off as an over-controlling maniac and Trey as an abusive thug. Oddly, the story had the potential for being quite a bit more interesting if some of the potential hints Murray and her adapters dropped had been followed up – like the whole irony that Damon’s fortune has been built on the roots of a crime (had Trey threatened to expose him in their final confrontation, the denouement would have been a lot more interesting) and the speed with which Damon descends from business success to street gangsta when his manhood has been threatened also suggests far more potential depth to these characters than we got. It also doesn’t help that Tiffany’s grandfather, when he’s shown preaching a sermon, sounds more like Flip Wilson’s “Church of What’s Happening Now!” parody of a Black minister than the real thing – and he’s apparently a recurring character in the series since we also saw him in the pulpit in the promos for Envy. Lust was surprisingly boring (especially for a film with that title!) and I’m not looking forward to Envy, though from the promos it appears to be about a woman who has the hots for her sister’s husband and I’m wondering if there’s anything in Victoria Christopher Murray’s background that draws her to write about sibling rivalry!`