Midsomer Murders: “Red in Tooth and Claw” (Bentley Productions, ITV, PBS, 2016)

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

Last night’s episode of Midsomer Murders, an engaging British mystery show set in a fictitious rural county called “Midsomer” located in central England that’s been running steadily since 1997, was originally aired on January 14, 2017 though the copyright date was 2016. It was called “Red in Tooth and Claw” and dealt with a so-called “small pets fair” hosted at the estate of Delphi Hartley (Susan Hampshire, who played the wife of John Churchill, founder of the Churchill dynasty, in the 1970’s British TV miniseries The First Churchills). “Small pets” seems to mean rabbits, guinea pigs and other assorted “cute” rodents, and the intrigue kicks off when Tim Benson (Steve Pemberton) is confronted by Seb Huntington (Maxim De Villiers). At first I thought Seb was going to turn out to be an animal-rights activist attempting to sabotage the show for political reasons – before the confrontation we see him open the rabbit cages and turn all the beasts loose – but he really works for real-estate agent Cleo Langton (Stirling Gallacher – that’s a woman, by the way) and he’s trying to get Delphi to sell the estate to him, which would put the small-pets fair out of business. Tim Benson is fiercely protective of his prize-winning rabbit Hercules, who’s won the competition five years in a row and could therefore fetch up to 200 pounds in stud fees every time he impregnates an identically pedigreed female rabbit – only the release of the rabbits has imperiled the whole rabbit-breeding business in the area because, loosed and free to roam wherever they will, the rabbits are screwing each other like, well, rabbits, without regard to their carefully maintained pedigrees or bloodlines.

Benson is also the owner of a pet supplies store called Furtastic with his estranged wife Alisa (Sara Crowe), and when Seb is found stabbed among the rabbit cages with blood all over him – his killer stabbed him and apparently hit an artery, resulting in a quick and massive loss of blood that killed him relatively quickly, both Bensons claim they were in the shop doing a stock check that night. Only Cleo was the only one of the two who was actually doing that: Tim was actually at his daughter Belinda Thissel’s (Vanessa Hehir) home. She’s the wife of the local hotel owner, Perry Tressel (Tom Price), who two decades earlier wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper calling for the end of the small-pets show on the ground that it was cruel to the animals, but since then he’s become reconciled to it, at least partly because the revenue from guests coming in from out of town to attend the show is a major part of his income. At the end of the first episode (the producers of Midsomer Murders made their episodes two-parters but PBS blessedly edits them together into a single continuity for their showings) Cleo Langton, the real-estate agent Seb Huntington worked for, is herself killed. It seems that, even though she’s a rabbit breeder herself, she’s developed a late-in-life allergy to rabbit fur. Her own rabbit is short-haired and that she can handle, but long-haired rabbit fur is literally death to her – she starts inhaling it in her car and ends up collapsing and dying as she frantically looks for the anti-allergy injection pens she always carries and finds they’re no longer there.

There’s also a subplot involving a family from India, father Jayesh Varma (Navinder Bhath) and his sons Dhruv (Simon Nagra) and Shray (Amit Shah), and Cleo Langton’s daughter Tegan (Aisling Loftus), who was dating Seb even though Shray had a crush on her. It also turns out that the prize-winning rabbit Hercules was murdered before the action began by Alisa Benson – who had given her husband the rabbit-or-me choice and then got pissed off when he picked the rabbit – which forced Tim to find another, similar-looking rabbit and pass it off as Hercules to get the stud fees. There’s also the increasing indebtedness of Delphi Hartley, who as a sideline writes historical romance novels but can’t get them published anymore because modern-day publishers want her to ramp up the sexual content. (They probably also want her to submit her manuscripts on computer files, or at least typewritten: the one book of hers we see – which she burns at the end when she realizes there’s no longer a market for her work – is written in longhand.) She grimly acknowledges that though she’s published 30 books, she could be accused of writing the same book 30 times (recalling Stravinsky;s joke about Vivaldi: “He didn’t write 900 concerti, he wrote one concerto 900 times”), and eventually both Millers get arrested for fraud in his case and for – I wasn’t sure what, killing a rabbit? – in hers, but neither of them are the killers.

The killer turns out to be Shray Varma (who was a logical suspect because he seemed so otherwise peripheral to the story, though his brother Dhruv was having an affair with Alisa Benson – though her only motive was to piss off her estranged husband and his was to get the job fixing the air conditioning in her building, or something), whose motive was his unrequited love for Tegan Langton and her determination to eliminate anyone who might get in his way of getting her: not only her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s boss but her estranged father Errol Judd (Sean Gallagher), a recovering alcoholic who has spent the last three years in Thailand and wanted Tegan to join him there. There’s also the case of Delphi’s missing furs, which which she was hoping to bail out her estate by selling them, which Shray stole and kept in a freezer because Delphi had warned everyone concerned that they had to be kept in really cold temperatures so they don’t shed. (Fur garments have become so politically incorrect they’ve pretty much passed from the scene, which is just fine as far as I’m concerned; unless you’re an Inuit or someone else who lives in similarly ultra-extreme cold, you have no need for them.) This wasn’t one of the better Midsomer Murders shows I’ve seen – the sheer number of suspects and multiplicity of motives got confusing after a while (which is my above synopsis was so long), and the whole idea of a “small pets show” seems a bit too twee and doesn’t have quite the dramatic possibilities of dance contests, choral competitions or some of the other rural challenges they’ve built previous shows around, but this is the sort of good-natured British mystery I have a soft spot in my heart for even though I generally prefer the more hard-boiled American stuff of Hammett, Chandler and the others who have followed in their wake.

La Signora Senza Camelie (The Lady Without Camelias) (Produzioni Domenico Forges Davanzati, Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche [ENIC], 1953)

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

Two nights ago my husband Charles and I watched one of the most extraordinary movies I’d seen in quite a while, a 1953 Italian film called La Signora Senza Camelie (“The Lady Without Camellias”), a pun on the title of Alexandre Dumas fils’ 19th century romance La Dame Aux Camélias, a tearjerker about a fatally ill courtesan who’s torn between the young man who genuinely loves her and the rich men who have been keeping her. It’s a well-known story largely due to the adaptations in both opera (Verdi’s La Traviata) and films (particularly a 1922 silent with Alla Nazimova and the even better known 1936 sound remake with Greta Garbo). La Signora Senza Camelie is a modern tale, directed by the young Michaelangelo Antonioni (only his second feature-length film) and based on his original story, though he had three other writers (Susa Cecchi D’Amico, Francisco Macelli and Pier Maria Pacinetti) to help convert it into an actual screenplay. Signora Senza Camelie is a grimly anti-romantic tale of the movie business in general, and in particular a young woman named Clara Manni (Lucia Bosé) who’s discovered by a film producer while working at a fabric store and instantly plugged into one of his productions, Addio, Signora! (rather antiseptically translated in the subtitles as Goodbye Lady), in which she sings a song at the end and brings the house down at the film’s first screening.

Her producer, Ercole “Ercolina” Borra (Gino Cervi), plans a major film for her called The Man Without Destiny in which she’ll play a farm girl who’s seduced by a traveler from the city and comes to a bad end. They shoot a highly lubricious scene for this movie – when the director starts worrying about the censors Clara and her co-star have already gone way beyond what actors in an American film would have been permitted in 1953 – but they run into an unexpected roadblock. Borra’s financial partner, Gianni Franchi (Andrea Cecchi), has decided he wants to marry Clara and bullies her into accepting his proposal, even bringing in her parents from the small town where she grew up to put additional pressure on her. It works – Clara marries him even though she’s not in love with him – but the two immediately depart for a week-long honeymoon, and when they get back Gianni decides that he no longer wants his wife to appear in a sexually exploitative movie. So, as half-owner of the film, he forces production to stop and looks around for a suitable vehicle in which to showcase Clara the way he wants audiences to see her: as a great actress suitable for virtuous roles.

Gianni ends up producing a movie about Joan of Arc with Clara as star, only the film flops and not only ruins her nascent career but leaves him virtually broke. I’d been wondering if Antonioni had got the idea from Ingrid Bergman, who made a version of Joan of Arc in 1948 that, along with the movies she made just before and after it (Arch of Triumph and Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn), flopped big-time and derailed her career even before her scandalous trip to Italy, where she made the film Stromboli and had an adulterous affair with her director, Roberto Rossellini, that led to her literally being denounced on the floor of the U.S. Congress and her films being banned in the U.S.), and there’s even a reference in a scene in which Joan of Arc is being screened at the Venice Film Festival and a woman is heard walking out of the theatre and saying, “After Falconetti and Bergman, how dare she!” (Falconetti – who variously used the first names Renée, Jeanne, Maria or no first name at all – played Joan of Arc in Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s French-made 1928 silent The Passion of Joan of Arc.) She also drifts off into an affair with an Italian diplomat, Bernardo “Nardo” Rusconi (Ivan Desny), though he seems to have the proverbial “girl in every port” as well as a wife who is pretty much still in the picture. Realizing that he wasn’t interested in her but just wanted the prestige and bragging rights of having an affair with an actual film star, she returns to Gianni and, after realizing that the only way for them to get out of the financial hole the failure of Joan of Arc put them in, agrees to finish the film Ercolina had started with her and Gianni had pulled her out of in the first place.

Clara also takes acting lessons for three months (until she runs out of money for them) and hopes to score the lead in a new serious drama Gianni is producing – only he tells her flat-out she’s not good enough for the role and he’s negotiating with an American actress for the lead. Instead he offers her yet another sexploitation role, and in a final scene that’s emotionally quite complex – you can read it as her surrendering to her fate (she’d overheard one woman at a screening of one of her films say, “She’s so beautiful – it’s a pity she can’t act!”) or as her finally taking agency of her own life and career even though that means resigning herself to being exploited for her physical beauty until she loses her visual appeal as she ages – she shows up for the first day of shooting on her new film, a costume drama about ancient Egypt called Slave of the Pyramids. She’s told to pose for a cast photo to promote the production, and at first she grimaces, but then, told she needs to smile for the photo to have its desired effect of getting people to want to see the movie when it’s made, she ultimately forces herself to smile and makes herself look genuinely happy to be making this film as our film fades out.

I remember when I was first getting into foreign films in the early 1970’s I saw quite a lot of the early movies of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, but the one Antonioni film I saw, L’Avventura (“The Adventure”), put me off. It was three hours long and seemed just pointless and boring; it’s about a party of well-to-do young Italians who charter a boat and take it to a small island, where one of them – a woman – disappears. We never find out exactly what happened to her because Antonioni couldn’t have cared less; instead he was interested in how readily her boyfriend forgets her and starts an affair with another one of the women on the trip, which continues after they return to the mainland. Antonioni’s reputation was making films paced so slowly that one joke about him was he would make a movie about a single day in a person’s life – and it would take an entire day to watch it. On the other hand, like two other quirky European art films made in the 1950’s – Max Ophuls’ last film, Lola Montes, and Jacques Rivette’s first, Paris Belongs to Us – Signora Senza Camelie was written up in David Thomson’s Movie Man, which was published in the late 1960’s and I first read in the early 1970’s, and I’d long been curious about the movie from his description.

It helps that Signora Senza Camelie is relatively short (one hour and 41 minutes) and that, unlike Antonioni’s later films, it has a well-constructed script with an obvious through-line for the main character – though it also has the virtue of uncertainty. Instead of so many films in which we’re a reel or two ahead of the director and writers in figuring out what’s going to happen next, it’s not clear from moment to moment in Signora Senza Camelie in just what direction Antonioni and his collaborators are going to take their story and how they’re going to have their heroine end up. Indeed, for much of the film I had assumed that, like the heroine of La Dame aux Camélies, they would have her get sick and die at the end – though the only real reference to Dumas’ tale is a scene in which it’s suggested as a future film for Clara, onliy Gianni rejects it because even though it’s romantic it’s still a story about a prostitute. (One could readily imagine, if she’d made that film, a woman walking out of the theatre and saying, “After Nazimova and Garbo, how dare she?”)

It’s also fascinating how the story of Signora Senza Camelie anticipates the careers of two real-life actresses after it was made. During the film I thought of both Marilyn Monroe – an actress merchandised by the industry as a shallow sex icon who desperately wanted more serious roles and studied at Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio to prepare for greater parts – and Jean Seberg, whose career was launched when director Otto Preminger discovered her in an international talent search and put her in his movie about Joan of Arc – only both her career and her personal life spiraled down after that and she ended up dying young under mysterious circumstances (as had Monroe). Also one intriguing aspect of Signora Senza Camelie is its unusual musical score by Giovanni Fusco, featuring a saxophone quartet led by Marcel Mulé (one of the two leading classical saxophonists of the mid-20th century, along with Sigurd Rascher) witn only the saxes and a piano as the instruments.

La Signora Senza Camelie is one of the most bitter and most hard-edged movies ever made about filmmaking, especially in depicting the brutality of the business and the cynicism with which its actors are exploited by the money men behind the scenes. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, Lucia Bosé was cast as Clara only after Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren (both in the early stages of their career before they achieved international fame) turned it down. It’s hard to imagine Lollobrigida in the role – like the character of Clara Manni, she was beautiful but couldn’t act – but it’s intriguing to imagine this as a vehicle for Loren, who certainly could act and proved it in her subsequent films. But to indulge on these might-have-beens takes away the credit from Lucia Bosé, who totally nails the role. It’s actually a considerable acting challenge for a talented performer to play someone who can’t act, and to make the role genuinely pathetic (in the good sense of the term) and feel for a character who’s in over his or her head. One of the things I liked about The Fluffer, a 2001 film about Gay porn which had genuine dramatic and emotional richness, was Scott Gurney’s performnace as the egomaniacal porn star at the center of the story; like Bosé here, he created an indelible character even while having to deliver his film-within-the-film lines in the flat monotone we expect from porn stars who have been cast for their looks rather than any acting skills. La Signora Senza Camelie is a quite remarkable film that deserves to be better known, and it makes me wonder if I’ve been unfair to Michaelangelo Antonioni as a director all these years …

The Black Watch (Fox Film Corporation, 1929)

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

Last night’s film was The Black Watch, a 1929 production of the Fox Film Corporation, which I ran in a grey-label DVD taken from a print shown in France (most likely a telecast) since it had hard-encoded French subtitles, which I suspect annoyed my husband Charles more than it did me. It was labeled as “A John Ford Production” – Ford was actually the director, not the producer, though quite a few movies in the early days of sound credited their directors that way – and it was Ford’s first sound feature. It was based on a novel by one Talbot Mundy called King of the Khyber Rifles and was remade in 1953 under that title, and I suspect Fox green-lighted the production because Paramount was shooting a film of A. E. W. Mason’s novel The Four Feathers and Fox wanted something to compete – though the film as it stands is essentially The Four Feathers meets She. The film starts at the beginning of World War I, and the Black Watch Regiment from Scotland is preparing to set sail for France to fight on the Western Front. Only Captain Donald Gordon King (Victor McLaglen, a bit more restrained than usual for him – usually, especially when he worked for Ford, he got to do beaver imitations on the scenery) is called in by his commanding officer just before the regiment sets sail and told that he won’t be going to France with his buddies. Instead he’s being sent on a secret mission to India, to what are now called the Northwest Frontier Provinces on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan (which are as notoriously ungovernable now as they were when this movie is set).

His job is to neutralize the threat posed by a woman warlord named Yasmani (Myrna Loy, in one of those Asian-vamp roles she came to detest; I joked that she was going to wake up next to William Powell and say, “Nick, I had the craziest dream … ”), who’s amassed an army of Muslim fighters that are threatening British control over that part of the Raj. The film as it stands is a rah-rah celebration of British imperialism, though it would be possible to give it an alternative reading in which Yasmani is leading an army of freedom fighters trying to liberate her country from British imperialism, and there’s even a bit of dialogue comparing her to Joan of Arc – though we’re quickly told that, unlike Joan of Arc (or at least the popular perception of her), she’s not averse to the joys of the flesh and gets a kick out of seducing the British officers sent to take her down. She’s already given this treatment to King’s predecessor, McGregor (John Ford’s actor brother, Francis Ford), whom after she tired of him she had his eyes put out and turned him into a beast of burden along with the other British soldiers her men captured and consigned to turning her compound’s mill. (I wondered if Victor Halperin saw this film and copied the setup for one of the most chilling scenes in his 1932 horror classic, White Zombie.)

Yasmani’s second-in-command is a local named Rewa Ghunga (Roy D’Arcy), who predictably looks jealous of Captain King, and King’s own local sidekick is his old friend Muhammad Khan (Mitchell Lewis). Yasmani also has a local mullah in tow to quote the Koran to her troops and otherwise give them suitable inspiration. For several reels nothing much happens except that Captain King and Yasmani dally with each other; Yasmani tells him she’s really a white girl, a descendant of Alexander the Great (no kidding!), and she and King are destined to rule the area and start a new line of white kings for an independent India. Like us, he thinks this is hogwash, but he’s able to persuade Yasmani to announce to her followers that she wants to call off the holy war and declare peace – whereupon they turn on her and shoot her dead. Eventually they try to fight, but they don’t get anywhere because King has already discovered where the army was storing its munitions, and King and his local allies have blown them up.

The Black Watch is a weirdly schizoid movie, offering some of Ford’s trademarks – notably his obsession with military ritual and his love of old songs. Even in the silent days, Ford had wanted to reference sentimental songs in his movies even though the only way he could do so was to put their lyrics on a title card and hope whoever was providing the live musical accompaniment in the theatre caught the reference and supplied the tune. Here Ford goes hog-wild with his new toy and throws song after song after song into the film, from the bagpipes that herald the Black Watch Regiment in the opening scene to the sentimental ballads King’s brother Malcolm (David Rollilns) sings and the out-of-tune version of “Home, Sweet Home” with which two middle-aged ladies who look like they wandered in from a James Whale horror movie sing to the soldiers as they set off for France. There are more songs in this movie than in some that were actually marketed as musicals, and it seems altogether fitting and predictable that when the action cuts from Britain to the frontier town of Peshawar, the first thing we hear is a muezzin standing atop a minaret calling the Muslim faithful to prayer with a song.

I’d heard of The Black Watch before only in Alexander Walker’s book on the silent-to-sound transition, The Shattered Silents: How the Movies Learned to Talk, and he ridiculed the film. In particular he pointed out that moviegoers in 1929 thought the pronunciation of Myrna Loy’s character name, “Yasmani” (I had expected “Yaz-MAH-nee” but the actors actually say “Yaz-MEE-nee”) sounded like “Yes, Minnie.” The Black Watch has some marvelous compositions – many of them during the periodic cuts from India to France where the rest of the Black Watch Regiment is fighting on the Western Front, going into battle like they did in the old days – marching into battle standing straight up and with the bagpipers herald their arrival – and getting themselves picked off until they finally realize what sort of war they’re fighting and go to ground, diving into trenches for cover and crawling towards the enemy when they advance. There’s also a great shot that introduces Yasmani behind an elaborate decorative screen – one of the surprisingly Sternbergian shots Ford and his cinematographers (here it was Joseph August, and the print quality is surprisingly good and does full justice to his work) did in the 1930’s before he started shooting more simply and directly. And there’s a quite creative moment in the script by John Stone (continuity) and James Kevin McGuinness (dialogue) in which Yasmani uses a crystal ball (literally) to show Captain King what’s going on at the Western Front while he’s dallying with her in India: he sees his brother Malcolm (ya remember Malcolm?) get wounded in battle and, instead of making him more malleable and susceptible to her charms, the vision has the opposite effect on Captain King: like Parsifal in the second-act confrontation with Kundry in Wagner’s opera Parsifal, the scene reminds King of his actual duty and snaps him away from any interest in his would-be seducer.

But The Black Watch is also quite ponderous at times; despite the creativity of August’s compositions he doesn’t seem interested in moving the camera (as James Curtis documented in his biography of James Whale, there was actually a sort of cold war between directors and cinematographers in the early 1930’s over moving-camera shots; directors liked them and cinematographers didn’t because they were harder to execute and, in particular, to light), and some of the actors deliver their lines normally while others … engage in … the long … pauses between their cue lines and their own lines that plagued a lot of the early talkies. Myrna Loy is the worst offender in this regard (I wondered if it was her first talkie, too, but according to imdb.com she made at least two before this, Hardboiled Rose – for which the film survives but the Vitaphone sound discs are lost, except for the fourth reel – and the first version of The Desert Song). She speaks all her lines in a slow, monotonous drawl, and I wasn’t sure whether she was talking that way to make the character seem more sultry and seductive or she was simply being thrown by the unfamiliar task of having to act with her voice. And this was a Fox film, meaning that she and everyone else had the advantage of the sound being recorded on film rather than a separate disc – one would have thought that this would have made films with Fox’s Movietone system more flexible and naturalistic than Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone sound-on-disc process, but anyone who’s seen Behind That Curtain (the deadly-dull 1929 Charlie Chan movie made at Fox by director Irving Cummings) would quickly be disabused of that notion. The Black Watch is a much better movie than Alexander Walker had led me to believe, and it’s obvious from the size and complexity of the sets that Fox gave Ford a pretty decent budget on it. But it’s also a movie stuck in a time warp, with its makers still caught up in the uncertainties of the transition and not always aware of the best way to use sound in a movie – as I’ve pointed out about other early talkies, once the movies learned to talk it took a while for filmmakers to realize when they should make them shut up again!

VOCES: “American Exile” (Latino Public Television, WKAR, PBS-TV, aired November 16, 2021)

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

After The Black Watch Charles and I watched a quite compelling program on PBS: American Exile, an episode in the VOCES series about Latinos in America (I shall never call them by that hideous, offensive appellation “Latinx”!) about how long-term U.S. residents who served in the U.S. military but were not born in the United States – many of them what today would be called “Dreamers,” people brought into the country without documentation by their parents while they were still children – have been targeted for deportation and sent back to their ostensible “home” countries where they have never lived as adults and know little or nothing of the national culture. I’d heard some reports on this issue and jumped at the chance to see a program that promised an in-depth view of it. Produced under the auspices of WKAR, a public television statement headquartered at the University of Michigan – though the footage ranged from Colorado Springs, Colorado to the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The show’s focus is on three U.S. veterans, brothers Manuel and Valente Valenzuela, who came to the U.S. as children and served in the Viet Nam war (Valente was involved in the infamous “Phoenix Program” in which, under the direction of the CIA, Viet Namese peasants were captured and systematically tortured to death on suspicion of being associated with the Viet Cong), received military honors and honorable discharges, and thought they’d earned the permanent right to stay in the U.S. in exchange for their service.

Then, in 1996, a Republican-controlled Congress passed, and Democratic President Bill Clinton signed (just in case you think “bipartisanship” is always a good thing), a new immigration law that allowed the deportation of U.S. veterans who’d been born overseas and vastly expanded the list of crimes for which they could be deported and permanently excluded from the U.S. Many of these crimes were simple misdemeanors ranging from public drunkenness to possession of marijuana and low-level assaults – crimes many veterans commit as a result of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The Valenzuelas both had minor arrest records of this type and had paid their fines, served their probations and thought they had paid their debt to society and been done with it. Then that 1996 law kicked in and U.S. immigration authorities went through America’s criminal record databases looking for people who had broken some of the laws listed in the new bill and targeting them for deportation. Some of them, including the Valenzuelas, hired attorneys and fought back against the deportation orders, while spending literally years living in fear that some day there would be a knock on the door at 3 a.m. or a van pulling up beside them on the street to spirit them away and back “home” to Mexico or wherever they nominally came from. The show included clips of news coverage of some of these cases on both CNN and Fox – and, predictably, the Fox hosts were screaming epithets like, “They committed a crime just by being here illegally!”

The Valenzuelas were the principal focus of the show, but in some ways the third victim of a threatened deportation had an even more tragic story. His name was Zahid Chaudhry and he was an immigrant from Pakistan who came over legally on a student visa and then overstayed it. He married an American woman, Ann, and thought that would enable him to become a U.S. citizen. He also worked as a volunteer firefighter and then joined the military – only his career was short-lived since during a training exercise, he collapsed and the other U.S. military trainees literally trampled over him, putting him pernanemtly in a wheelchair. According to https://keepzahidhome.org, a Web site opened to support him, he was denied his “Earned, Qualified, Expedited Military N-400 application” for U.S. citizenship in 2019, a full six years after he had filed it, and his only hope lay in an application to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. As for the Valenzuelas, Miguel and Valente had very different. Miguel bought a van and had it decorated with slogans and drawings illustrating his plight and demanding that he be allowed to remain in the U.S., and be given American citizenship – indeed, in the show he proudly displays the ballot he received to vote in an election (Colorado is a state that conducts its elections entirely by mail) as proof that the Colorado state government, at least, already considers him an American citizen. He determined to drive the 2,000 miles between Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C. to raise public awareness of the issue and present his demand for citizenship status and relief from deportation directly to then-President Donald Trump. Just what the response to Miguel’s appeal was is not shown here, but he did get chances to appear on local media and express his belief that no one who servied the U.S. by joining its military and fighting in its wars should be forced to leave it.

Valente, on the other hand, ultimately decided to “self-deport,” choosing to cross the border back into Mexico at the same small town where his parents had crossed with him and Manuel over 50 years before. In one of the film’s most heart-rending scenes, he is shown throwing his military service medals into the Rio Grande. He ultimately settles into his new life in Chihuahua, writing a book about his service in Viet Nam and his struggle with the U.S. government over his immigration status, and it’s emblematic of his separation from the U.S. and everything connected with it that he wrote the book in Spanish. He also married a Mexican woman and settled down with her – there’s a funny scene in which he has trouble fitting into his old U.S. service uniform and we wonder if the excellent meals we’ve earlier seen his wife cooking for him have had anything to do with that. The show has an at least temporarily happy ending – an announcement that on July 2, 2021 President Joseph Biden issued an executive order stopping all deportations of U.S. veterans and announcing at least some sort of program to allow already deported vets to return to the U.S. – but as with so many of the wrongs Biden has tried to make right, it could easily be undone by a future President and the penalization of immigrants for serving the U.S. could start all over again at any time.

Josephine Baker: The Story of an Awakening (ARTE Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) Hellenic Radio & Television [ERT], Kepler 22 Production Kinoport La Procirep-Angoa Novak Production, American Public Television, PBS, 2018)

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

Last night at 10 p.m. the local PBS station, KPBS, ran a 2018 French documentary called Josephine Baker: The Story of an Awakening (though the original French title translates to Josephine Baker: The First Black Icon). It was an account of the great singer/dancer/entertainer/activist’s life that focused on her relationship to racism and her inability to escape the prejudices of the time. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906 and at the age of seven started working as a maid in the homes of well-to-do white St. Louisiana. Director Ilana Navaro acknowledged that there was a thriving Black middle class in St. Louis at the time, but Baker’s family weren’t part of it (as the next Black celebrity from St. Louis, Miles Davis, was). At age 13 she was preparing to do her latest employer’s dishes when she let the water boil too long and the dishes broke – whereupon the white woman she was working for plunged Baker’s hands into the boiling water as punishment. Baker decided to run away and seek work as a dancer. Her mom said, “If that’s the sort of life you want, go for it” –º essentially disowning her. Baker tried to get work in the chorus lines of New York nightclubs but was rejected as too gawky, too skinny and too dark – these were the days of the infamous “paper-bag rule” in which the Cotton Club’s owners held a brown grocery bag next to the face of each would-be chorus dancer, and if her skin was darker than the bag she didn’t get hired.

In 1925 she got an offer to come to Paris to dance in something called La Revue Negre – ironically, Sidhey Bechet was on the same ship (he was fleeing an assault charge in New York and decided to light out for the country he, as a mixed-race New Orleans Creole, considered his real homeland: not Africa, but France). When La Revue Negre opened it bombed – its producer had tried to do a relatively sophisticated Harlem-style show and he realized what the Parisian audience wanted from Black performers was a racist caricature of their supposed lives back in Africa. (The show includes footage of a carnival exhibit of Blacks supposedly re-enacting their original lives in the African countries the French were then colonizing.) Baker developed a unique style – like Fanny Brice, she seems to have figured out a way to turn her gawkiness to her advantage – and eventually she became an icon of cool in Paris, attracting white fans (and white lovers) and becoming a huge star in her adopted country. (The narration throughout claims that Baker was the first Black star to have a multi-racial audience; always on the lookout for examples of what I call “first-itis,” I immediately said, “What about Bert Williams?”)

Alas, when she returned to the U.S. to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 (Florenz Ziegfeld had been dead for four years by then but his widow, Billie Burke, licensed the name to Ziegfeld’s hated rivals, the Shuberts, as part of her determination to raise enough money to pay Ziegfeld’s debts), she got on the boat an acclaimed international superstar – and got off it as just another colored girl. When she showed up to occupy the hotel rooms that nad been booked for “Josephine Baker,” she got cold stares and assurances that there had been a “mistake.” Her act didn’t go over well either with white audiences or Blacks in the nascent civil rights movement, who criticized her for not doing more to help the struggle. According to this documentary, Baker found her social conscience during World War II, when France was occupied by the Nazis and Baker enlisted in the Resistance, carrying messages written in invisible ink over the scores of her songs and risking her life in the service of Liberation. (Unlike some French entertainers, like Édith Piaf, whose publicists gave them fictional Resistance exploits so they would be allowed to work after the war instead of being denounced as collabós, Baker’s were for real and were acknowledged in the 1950’s by the French government, when they awarded her the Legion of Honor.)

Baker tried another shot at a comeback in her native land in the late 1940’s, but her increasing civil-rights activism – including organizing a picket line outside the Stork Club when she was refused service (they didn’t bar her; they just didn’t send a waiter to her table, either), got her denounced as a Communist by J. Edgar Hoover and expelled from the U.S. The show ends in 1963, when Baker finally returned to the U.S. to speak at the 1963 March on Washington (she was the only woman who actually spoke there, though some women performers, including Joan Baez and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, sang), wearing her Free French uniform and presenting herself not as Josephine Baker, entertainer, but Josephine Baker, freedom fighter. She got to speak at the March because Martin Luther King, Jr. personally lobbied then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to lift the travel ban on Baker in the U.S. The final clip is from one of Baker’s last performances, in which she rather ironically commented on how she didn’t wear the banana skirts she had in the old days – a sort of rueful reflection on her age similar to what Marlene Dietrich in her later performances. It also mentioned that after World War II Baker adopted 12 children from various racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds and called them her “Rainbow Tribe” – though it doesn’t tell how the expense of raising them drove her into bankruptcy.

Director Navaro argued that this was the first use of the term “rainbow” to denote the ideal of a multi-racial society, and quoted Nelson Mandela as saying his goal was to create a “Rainbow Nation” in South Africa once apartheid ended – of course, there was also Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” in his 1984 and 1988 U.S. Presidential campaigns and the adoption of the rainbow flag as the symbol of Queer pride. Josephine Baker lived a fabulous life – when she died in 1975 she was living, where else, in Paris, where she had become accepted and achieved superstar status (and it’s one of the quirkier aspects of Baker’s career that, though it took her four years after the moved to France for her to feel comfortable enough with French to sing in it, her voice, with its fast vibrato, has long seemed to me better suited to singing in French than in English) – and while her triumph over racism isn’t the only way to look at her life, it’s certainly a real and quite appropriate one.

Adele: One Night Only (“Live” at Griffith Park Observatory, Los Angeles) (Fulwell 73, Onwards Productions, Harpo Productions, CBS-TV, aired November 14, 2021)

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

Throughout the last two weeks CBS had been promoting the special they were going to show last night about the singer Adele. It was billed as “Adele: One Night Only” and was a live show that took place in front of the iconic Griffith Observatory in Lous Angeles, where much of the film Rebel Without a Cause was shot. She performed on the famous steps where Sal Mineo’s character is shot in the movie and a little man in a suit, played by director Nicholas Ray, shows up at the end to open the observatory. The show promised a concert by Adele as well as an interview of her by Oprah Winfrey, and from that I was hoping that it would be the full interview and then the concert. Instead it was a ghastly format in which Oprah’s interview with Adele, filmed in the garden of Oprah’s estate, was cut up into segments and kept intruding itself into the performance. Through the two-hou9r length of the show Adele got to perform only 10 songs, all but one being the type she’s become known for: big power ballads about dysfunctional relationships. Oprah’s interview with Adele was of such crushing banality I found myself wondering if her fabled talk show was as mind-numbingly cutesy-poo oppressive as this. She kept quizzing Adele on the details of her personal life, including her recently ended marriage to Simon and the child they had, Angelo, before she decided she was no longer happy in the relationship and decided to divorce him. Not that he’s out of her life altogether: they still live next door to each other and share parenting duties for Angelo – but she’s currently dating a Black super-agent whose name whizzed by me but whose photo was shown, and she’s said that someday she’d like to have another child.

The purpose of this show was to promote her new album, 30. Adele has named all her albums after the age she was when she recorded them: her previous albums were 19, 21 and the Grammy Album of the Year winner 25 – apparently Adele herself thought Beyoncé’s Lemonade should have won, and so did a lot of other people, including one of my oldest friends with whom I got into an argument about it. But as far as I’m concerned there was no contest: I love Adele precisely because she’s so straightforward. Like the singers I love from previous eras, including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, she hasn’t slimmed down to concentration-camp survivor dimensions, she doesn’t leap around the stage like a Mexican jumping bean, and though her costume was an elaborate black gown and she joked about being unable to sit down in it in a normal chair, at least she kept the same outfit on throughout the show and didn’t slip off the stage periodically for costume changes. I fell in love (metaphorically) with Adele the first time I saw her on TV – here was a “woman of size” who wasn’t afraid or ashamed to look like one, though she mentioned the exercise regimen she went on that took off 100 pounds (she did it, she said, less to lose weight than to give her life structure when she wasn’t recording or touring – and she and Oprah commiserated about their struggles with weight-loss regimens), thoug she’s still on the hefty side and I love her for than. What’s more, she just stood there and sang, trusting in the sheer power and artistry of her voice to move her audiences instead of surrounding herself with choristers, huge sets and all the crappy trimmings that are burying talented singers like Beyoncé in overproduced garbage. (I’ve joked in these pages before that Beyoncé’s over-the-top videos look like they were directed by the love-child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl.)

Though Adele has had surgery for nodes on her vocal cords (an operation that’s been a career-killer for other singers – can you say “Julie Andrews”? – but which she seems to have survived just fine), those incredible pipes are still very much intact. She not only can sing spectacular high notes, but (like Louis Armstrong as a trumpet player) she doesn’t have to thin out her tone to make them: her soaring high notes are as full-bodied as the rest of her voice. If I have a problem with Adele it’s that so much of her material hews to one sound – she even joked when she did her one fast song of the night that her audience better enjoy it while they could – that it’s difficult to remember her songs because they all collect into one powerfully sung but somewhat mind-numbing moan. I felt especially sorry for the young Black couple, Quentin and Ashley, for whom Adele and Oprah worked out a promotional stunt that included Quentin taking Ashley to Adele’s concert with blindfold and noise-canceling headphones on, leading her to the stage (in what reminded me of an old sensitivity-training exercise I went through in high school, in which students were paired off and one was blindfolded while the other led them around campus – the point was to put your trust that totally in another person you were literally willing to let you lead them around while you couldn’t see where you were going), where he told her to take off the blindfold and himself removed her headphones so she could see he was offering her a marriage proposal in front of Adele and her audience. I was at once amused by the spectacle, rather appalled at the willingness of these people to let their proposal be exploited that way, and fearful of their future as a couple. After all, he was proposing to her in the middle of a concert by a singer who’s most famous for songs about dysfunctional relationships!

The Lineup (Columbia, 1958)

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

The film on last night’s Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” show was The Lineup, a combination police procedural and crime thriller made at Columbia Pictures in 1958 and based on a TV series, originally also called The Lineup when it first aired on CBS from 1954 to 1960, though when it was sold in syndication after its network run was over it was retitled San Francisco Beat. The show was basically a knock-off of Dragnet set in San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, and both the show and the movie acknowledged the cooperation of the San Diego Police Department in the closing credits. Like Dragnet, The Lineup was supposedly based on actual crimes that had been reported in its city, and its stars were Warner Anderson as Lt. Ben Guthrie, Tom Tully as Inspector Matt Grubb, and Marshall Reed as Inspector Fred Ascher. Anderson and Reed both appeared as the same characters in the film, but Tully wasn’t in the movie and he was replaced by a different actor, Emile Meyer, playing a different character, Inspector Al Quine. (I wondered if that was an in-joke tribute to one of Columbia’s top directors at the time, Richard Quine.) Producer Jaime del Valle obviously thought there would be a market for a feature-film version of his TV show, as there had been for a feature-film version of Dragnet four years earlier (whose star, Jack Webb, had directed the film himself, and whose script contained one unwittingly funny line referring to an “eyeball witness” – both my husband Charles and I jumped on that and joked at almost the same time, “What did the ‘eyeball witness’ see the eyeball doing?”), though he was unable to get Columbia to give him enough of a budget to make the movie in color.

But he got quite compelling help behind the camera: the director was Don Siegel (13 years before he would make another, much better-known policier set in San Francisco, Dirty Harry); the screenwriter was Stirling Silliphant (who had written some of the early episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club before branching out into crime thrillers though his experience at Disney might have stood him in good stead writing for the child who appears as a key character in the film), and the cinematographer was Hal Mohr. Mohr had actually been born and raised in San Francisco, and as a boy had personally witnessed the 1906 earthquake and fire that nearly destroyed the city – which stood him in good stead in 1927, when he was assigned to a film about the quake called Old San Francisco. The film is full of San Francisco landmarks – many of which I remember from my own life in the Bay Area from 1953 to 1979, and quite a few of which no longer exist (Sutro’s Museum, the Steinhart Aquarium, the Cliff House and the Embarcadero Freeway – the Cliff House lasted until the pandemic permanently closed it in 2020, Sutro’s _ originally built as a public bathhouse in 1894 and later converted into a skating rink and 19th century museum – burned down in 1966, the aquarium and adjacent De Young Museum were torn down and replaced in the 2000’s, and the Embarcadero Freeway – famously unfinished when protests from San Franciscans led the California Department of Transportation to abandon it in 1958 – was finally torn down in 1990 after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 made it structurally too dangerous to survive).

But what makes it worth seeing today is Siegel’s taut, high-energy direction and the audacious conception of Silliphant’s script. A drug cartel led by a mysterious figure known only as “The Man” (Vaughn Taylor, who two years later played the banker Janet Leigh embezzled from in Hitchcock’s Psycho) hides quantities of uncut heroin in knickknacks and sell them to unsuspecting tourists in Japan, Taiwan aHong Kong, thereby unwittingly turning ordinary, innocent civilians into the cartel’s mules. In the opening, a cab driver who’s a heroin addict himself (no doubt the cartel promised to pay him in “product”) snatches a bag at the San Francisco docks from a San Francisco opera official named Phillip Dressler (Raymond Bailey). Then the driver is spooked when a truck cuts right across his getaway route; he ends up crashing his cab and dies from the attack, but not before he ran over and killed a uniformed cop who was trying to get him to stop. The cops seize the bag stolen from Dressler and inventory its contents, realize the doll Dressler bought at a curio shop in Hong Kong for $20 contained heroin, and give the bag back to Dressler after confiscating the heroin and replacing it with a similarly wrapped package of milk sugar. Uncertain whether Dressler was part of the smuggling operation or an innocent victim, they give him back his bag but trace him for the next few days.

Then we cut to the first scene in the movie that really interested Don Siegel – a United airliner flying into San Francisco with a two-person hit team, Dancer (Eli Wallach, in his second film) and Julian (Robert Keith, Brian Keith’s father). Though the relationship between them lacks the homoerotic overtones between Lawrence Tierney and Elisha Cook, Jr. in their similar roles in Born to Kill (1947), Siegel once again used a pair of hit men in his 1964 version of The Killers. Siegel said that at no time during the making of The Killers did he realize how similar it was to The Lineup, but later on re-seeing both films he caught the resemblances – not only the two-man hit-person team but details like the murders inside steam baths that occur in both films, and the lead killer’s preferred weapon: a silencer-equipped pistol he carries in a briefcase. Dancer and Julian have come to San Francisco to reclaim the heroin Dressler was unknowingly carrying (the cops put Dressler through a lineup – well, ,there had to be a justification for the title! – but he’s unable to recognize the porter who grabbed his bag and threw it into the cab driver’s taxi) and also get it back from the other people who had been the cartel’s unwitting mules. One of them is a rich man named Sanders who had bought an elaborate set of Asian flatware in Singapore with heroin concealed in the handles – he and his wife escape but Dancer shoots his Asian houseboy when he tries to keep the pair from stealing the flatware set – and Julian asks Dancer what the victim’s last words were so he can inscribe them in a notebook in which he writes the last words of everyone Dancer kills. Later Dancer and Julian trace a member of the crew of the liner the unwitting mules came to San Francisco on, the Pacific Princess, who stumbled on the heroin concealed in an antique Chinese horse and wanted to sell it himself – bad move.

The last shipment was carried in by a mother, Dorothy Bradshaw (Mary LaRoche), and her daughter Cindy (Cheryl Callaway – see, I told you there was an important role for a child in this film!), who were carrying the heroin in a doll Dorothy had brought Cindy. Only Cindy unwittingly discovered the heroin concealed in her doll and used it all to powder her doll’s face. Dancer and Julian discover her in the Steinhart Aquarium – one wonders if writer Sillliphant was inspired by the similar scene in Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai a decade earlier (also a Columbia production), in which the characters played by Welles and Rita Hayworth are caught illicitly kissing in the halls between the fish tanks – and they offer the two a ride back to their hotel. Apparently Dorothy’s relationship to Cindy’s father is in an uncertain state – they were hoping he would be there to greet them when they arrived on their trip but he wasn’t, and there’s a part of her that really isn’t all that surprised – and that’s why they accept Dancer’s and Julian’s invitation. Once inside Dancer grabs the kid’s doll – in the film’s most frightening scene – and destroys it before he finally realizes that the kid really did waste all that high-priced dope powdering her doll’s face. Worried that “The Man” is going to order him killed if he turns in a short quantity of the drugs he was supposed to retrieve, he takes mom and daughter hostage and drags them along to the meeting place at Sutro’s. He corners “The Man” and realizes he’s just an old guy in a wheelchair, and “The Man” tells Dancer, “You’re dead. No one ever sees me.” Siegel told interviewer Stuart M. Kaminsky that he meant “The Man” as a metaphor for God, and as a non-believer he staged this scene to ridicule the whole concept of an all-powerful entity ruling over human behavior and dishing out dire, eternal punishments for the slightest transgressions against his arbitrary rules.

Dancer, who was hoping he could bring the Bradshaws with him so they could explain to “The Man” what they did with the heroin, gets frustrated when “The Man” dismisses him and tells him he will die for actually seeing him, pushes the wheelchair-bound “The Man” over the railing at Sutro’s to his death on the floor of the ice rink below. (It seems likeliy that Silliphant was influenced here by Richard Widmark's murder of Mildred Dunnock by pushing her and her wheelchair down a flight of stairs in the 1947 Kiss of Death, which started the trend for villains in films noir to murder people with disabilities in particularly bizarre and cruel ways.) Then he, Julian, their driver Sandy McLain (Richard Jaeckel) and the Bradshaws drive away, with the police in hot pursuit, and end up in a spectacular car chase which Noir Alley host Eddie Muller hailed as the greatest car-chase scene ever filmed until Steve McQueen’s Bullitt (also set in San Francisco) in 1969. The car chase features some spectacular stunt driving – Jaeckel’s stunt driver was a man named Guy Way, who enlisted his wife to be in the scene as well as Mary LaRoche’s double. The script called for him to drive right to the edge at which the uncompleted Embarcadero Freeway abruptly ended in a sheer drop to the road below, then make a sudden and severe turn to avoid falling off – and apparently Mrs. Way was so spooked by what her husband put her through that she had nightmares for three days. But a lot of the chase is done with process screens (pretty obvious process screens, at that) and it’s not as exciting now as it no doubt was in 1958.

The Lineup ends with Dancer and Julian caught in a trap – a V-shaped barrier designed to keep cars from going off the end of the unfinished freeway – and the cops gun down the bad guys and rescue the Bradshaws. The Lineup has quite a few felicitous touches, including one sequence in which Dorothy Bradshaw asks Julian point-blank why he and Dancer do what they do, and he answers with a surprisingly admiring description of Dancer as “a pure psychopath.” It’s not very often in a film noir (which this definitely is thematically, though less so visually – by the 1950’s movie equipment had become more portable and this encouraged companies to go on location and actually shoot films in the locales where they were set, which gained in verisimilitude but at the expense of losing the carefully constructed chiaroscuro studio-bound visuals of classic noir; despite the advantages of location shooting, I still think the greatest crime film set in San Francisco is the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, even though aside from a few second-unit establishing shots of the Ferry Building not a frame of it was shot there!) that an ordinary human being asks a denizen of the noir underworld just why he or she does what s/he does!

According to Siegel’s interview with Kaminsky (which I read first in a 1971 film magazine and then, in a longer version, as a full-length book), Eli Wallach came to the project with a chip on his shoulder because his first film had been a prestige production, Baby Doll, directed by Elia Kazan, co-starring Karl Malden and Carroll Baker (in her film debut, too) and with an original screenplay by Tennessee Williams. Wallach felt that after such a promising debut his agents had let him down by booking him for a routine thriller as his second film – until midway through the shoot he realized he was actually playing a complex role in a well-written script that was far more than just a cops-and-robbers movie. Then he became far more cooperative and easier for Siegel to work with. Since the character was called “Dancer” he tried to move like one (though he wasn’t about to keep Gene Kelly awake nights worrying about the competition), and there’s a chilling matter-of-factness about his portrayal that reflects this film’s position in between the out-and-out raving Lawrence Tierney had done in his psycho roles and the boyish innocence concealing his homicidal mania Anthony Perkins brought to his part in Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960. The Lineup is a quite interesting and entertaining film, one of those classic-era Hollywood products that manages to scare far more with the threat of violence than the on-screen presentation of it, and while Siegel said he was uninterested in the police-procedural aspects of the story (only one scene shows the famous round window in Warner Anderson’s character’s office that was a trademark in virtually every episode of the TV show) he actually keeps the cops’ and the crooks’ stories well balanced, as Raoul Walsh had done in White Heat (1949) and Siegel would do again in Dirty Harry.