West Side Story (Beta Productions, The Mirisch Corporation, Seven Arts, United Artists, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 16) Turner Classic Movies (TCM) reached the midpoint of their “31 Days of Oscar” commemoration during which they devote the entire month of February, plus the first three days of March, to movies that either won or at least were nominated for Academy Awards. Last night’s theme was movies set in or around New York City, and the first on their agenda (at least the earliest my husband Charles and I watched) was the 1961 version of West Side Story. It was based on the 1957 mega-hit musical composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents adapted fairly loosely from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. (I remember a great comment the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen published when Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet came out. A teenage girl coming out of the theatre told him, “It was great – but they stole the plot from West Side Story!”) I was eight when the 1961 West Side Story came out and I immediately hailed it as the greatest movie ever made, and when the 1962 Academy Awards came around I wrote down the winners (for the first, but not the last, time in my life!) and was gratified that West Side Story won 10 of the 11 awards for which it was nominated. I saw it three times on its initial theatrical run and twice more when it was reissued in 1970, but that time around the bloom was decidedly off the rose and I noticed flaws that had eluded me eight years before, notably the weak casting of the leads.

As almost all the world certainly knows by now, West Side Story tells of the rivalry between two New York street gangs, the largely ethnic white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Tony (Richard Beymer) is a former Jet who’s retired from the gang life and taken a job as a stock boy at Doc’s (Ned Glass) candy store, but Riff (Russ Tamblyn), the Jets’ leader, wants him back for a battle royal with the Sharks. Riff and the Sharks’ leader, Bernardo (George Chakiris), arrange a meeting at a dance at the local gym – proclaimed “neutral territory” by the rival gangs – to hold a war council to plan the upcoming rumble. Tony is practically dragged there by Riff, but once there he meets Bernardo’s sister Maria (Natalie Wood, top-billed) and is instantly smitten with her. The problems are not only that the Sharks and the Jets are bitter enemies but Maria already has a Puerto Rican boyfriend, Chino (Jose De Vega, whom Charles thought looked oddly Asian; he wondered whether Chino was from a Filipino family who had emigrated to Puerto Rico), who’s a lot more important to this story than the equivalent Paris is in Romeo and Juliet. Nonetheless Tony and Maria agree to meet later that night on a fire escape (the closest Arthur Laurents and screenwriter Ernest Lehman – the one contributor to West Side Story who got nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win – could get to a balcony). Tony thinks he’s neutralized the threat by negotiating so that the rumble will consist only of a fistfight between a champion from each gang, but when the event finally occurs both sides sneak in switchblades. Bernardo kills Riff and Tony, out of revenge and hurt, kills Bernardo. Bernardo’s girlfriend Anita (Rita Moreno) is understandably angry that Maria is still swearing her love for Tony even though Tony killed her brother, and in the end – instead of the famous suicides that end Shakespeare’s play – Chino kills Tony with a gun he’s got from somewhere and Maria grabs the gun from him and forces the surviving members of both gangs to declare peace. A lot of critics faulted the ending of West Side Story for allowing Maria, unlike Juliet, to live, but that’s not the biggest problem.

One major problem with the movie is the filmmakers, directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (Robbins had directed the stage version solo and the filmmakers brought him in for the movie with the idea that he would direct the big dance numbers, as he had on stage, and Wise would do the plot parts, but midway through the production Robbins was fired after they’d shot most of the numbers), made the same mistake that producer Arthur Freed and directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen had made with the last big film of a Leonard Bernstein musical, On the Town (1949). They shot the opening sequence in New York City (on abandoned tenement blocks that were about to be torn down to make room for Lincoln Center) and created a spectacularly authentic scene that only made the rest of the film look more “fake” than usual because it was all studio-bound. At least one set, the outside window of Doc’s store, gets seen so often we want to wave to it and say hello. The other problem with the movie is the strangeness of the casting. Natalie Wood is spectacularly miscast as a Puerto Rican and it seems amazing to me that the most famous movies about juvenile delinquency, this one and Rebel Without a Cause, both featured her even though that wasn’t her image at all. Richard Beymer is almost totally inert; after West Side Story he got to do one other major movie, playing Nick Adams in a film awkwardly titled Ernest Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, before he sneaked back to the maw from which he’d been pulled: television. What’s more, of the five principals only George Chakiris did his own singing: Wood was dubbed by Marni Nixon (voice double to the stars; she’d already doubled for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and would go on to sub for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady), Beymer by Jimmy Bryant, Tamblyn by Tucker Smith and Moreno (who’d sung for herself in The King and I) by Betty Wand.

Now for the good news: Bernstein’s score, orchestrated by Irwin Kostal and conducted to the nines by Johnny Green, remains imperishably beautiful. Its characteristic combination of soaring quasi-operatic lyricism (which was why Rita Moreno didn’t get to do her own singing as she had in previous musicals) and driving percussion-driven energy. What’s more, the people behind the camera – cinematographer Daniel L. Fapp, production designer Boris Leven, and set decorator Victor A. Gangelin – allowed the backgrounds actually to be colorful. They didn’t decide to represent urban poverty by making everything all dank greens and browns the way a modern version of the story would do it; scene after scene is literally a feast for the eyes, dazzling us with ultra-bright colors. Sondheim’s lyrics match the brilliance of Bernstein’s music and come close to what he would later do on his own as composer as well as lyric writer, and his acid-tinged jibes in the song “Gee, Officer Krupke” look forward to similar satires in his own big shows, like “A Little Priest” in Sweeney Todd and “It’s Hot Up Here” in Sunday in the Park with George. The film is also impeccably paced, with number following number with freight-train regularity – though, as with most musicals, the story gets considerably talkier as it progresses. And while the stars may be weak, the supporting players are powerful and thoroughly consistent: there’s a reason why George Chakiris and Rita Moreno both won Academy Awards for their performances while Wood and Beymer didn’t even get nominated. They just stand out that much better – as does Russ Tamblyn, the true unsung hero of this movie.

Dwight Macdonald faulted the film on its initial release for, among other things, having cast the big fight scenes, including the final rumble, in a partly realistic and partly stylized version which he called “nonart.” But while the confrontations in West Side Story may bear little resemblance to actual teen street violence then or now (of course now the gangs would be dealing drugs and be armed with better guns than the police trying to catch them – represented in West Side Story by two cops, Simon Oakland as plainclothes detective Schrank and William Bramley as uniformed officer Krupke, of almost Keystone-esque incompetence), they work on their own terms as half turf battles and half choreography. West Side Story is strangely moving almost in spite of itself – Chino’s murder of Tony seems almost like an afterthought and Maria’s final speech doesn’t have the wallop of Friar Laurence’s in Shakespeare, in which he finally brings the warring families together after the deaths of both their star-crossed heirs – but the combination of Bernstein’s music and the dazzling cinematography make it hold up surprisingly well. One thing I hadn’t remembered was how tight the actors’ pants were; they showed off much bigger baskets than were common in 1961 movies, which no doubt pleased Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents and all the other Gay or Bisexual men who’d been instrumental in creating West Side Story in the first place. And I loved the bizarre character of “Anybody’s” (Susan Oakes), the androgynous female who tries to join the Jets and participate in the gang fights, even though she keeps getting snubbed by the male members of the gang. I haven’t seen Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, and I’m sorry he missed what I thought would be the most workable way to update it to the present: make the Jets Black, so it would be a war between Black and Puerto Rican street gangs much like the Black vs. Latino wars that have plagued all too many modern U.S. cities.

Annie Hall (Jack Rollins-Charles H. Joffe Productions, United Artists, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Next up on Turner Classic Movies’ February 16 night of Academy Award-winning films set in or around New York City was Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen’s Best Picture winner and also a movie I saw on its initial theatrical release and absolutely loved. I don’t need to rehash all the publicity Woody Allen has received since, both good and bad; he’s been hailed as the greatest comedy genius in cinema since Charlie Chaplin and reviled (mostly by his ex-partner, Mia Farrow) as literally a child molester. Allen famously announced in advance that he wouldn’t be attending the Academy Awards ceremony the year Annie Hall was nominated because he’d be playing his usual gig as a jazz clarinetist in a New York nightclub on Monday nights. (The Academy Awards were held on Mondays then; later they moved them to Sundays, where they are now: the next one will be March 2, 2025.) That was either a well-intended or unintended fuck-you to Hollywood and the entire movie industry, not all that surprising given that Annie Hall itself is largely about the clash of cultures between New York and Los Angeles. The film’s two central characters are mid-level stand-up comedian Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and his girlfriend, aspiring (but not too aspiring) nightclub singer Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). They meet in New York and bond over a shared love of the arts and intellectual pursuits – though many of the movie’s laughs come from our realization that Alvy and Annie are as pretentious and surface-driven as the pseudo-intellectual acquaintances of whom they make fun.

Perhaps more than any of his other movies, Annie Hall is a compendium of Woody Allen’s Greatest Hits: during the scene in which he does stand-up in front of a largely student crowd at the University of Wisconsin, his jokes come almost completely from a comedy album he’d recorded for United Artists Records (United Artists was also the co-producer and distributor for Annie Hall) a decade earlier, including his marvelous line, “I was expelled from NYU during my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” Basically Annie Hall is about the culture clash not only between New York and L.A. but between crankily Jewish Alvy and white-bread shiksa Annie, who refers to her grandmother as “Grammy Hall” (“I’m dating a woman from a Norman Rockwell painting!” Alvy cracks). When Alvy spends a weekend with Annie’s family they’re accompanied by Annie’s ex, Duane Hall (a marvelous early performance by Christopher Walken back when he was still young and relatively cute), a thoroughgoing weirdo but one in “safe” Anglo-Protestant ways. When Annie spends a weekend with Alvy’s family they reminisce about how they were literally living in a house built into the Coney Island roller coaster when Alvy was born. The film periodically flashes back to sequences showing the prepubescent Alvy at school – the adult Alvy alternately sits back from the kids and takes his old place in the classroom – and in one of the film’s funniest moments he has the kids in class bark out about the careers they’re going to undertake as grown people. A number of them declare they’ll be financially successful in investment banking or finance. One boy says, “I used to be a heroin addict. Now I’m a methadone addict,” and an impossibly sweet-looking girl says, “I’m into leather.”

Alvy and Annie have something of a sex life together, though it runs into trouble when Annie insists on smoking pot before they make love and Alvy thinks his own masculinity (remember this is Woody Allen we’re talking about, hardly anyone’s idea – except maybe Allen’s own – of a sex god) ought to be enough to turn her on without chemical stimuli. Ultimately they drift apart and Annie takes up with rock musician Tony Lacey (Paul Simon) and moves to L.A. with him. Alvy flies there, ostensibly to appear as a presenter on an awards show (a gig he misses by oversleeping) but really to try to win Annie back. There’s a great scene at a party in which, this being the late 1970’s, the guests are all taking hits of a fairly large supply of cocaine. Rob (Tony Roberts), Alvy’s old childhood friend, is now a star on a terrible TV sitcom (Alvy visits him while in the mixing room where they’re adding laugh tracks to the show to make the lame gag lines sound funny; I’ve seen enough TV shows like that in real life I’d like to take the laugh-track machine aside and ask it, “What the hell do you think is so funny?”), and he brings along the coke supply and tells a thunderstruck Alvy the stuff costs $2,000 per ounce. “Two thousand dollars an ounce?” Alvy asks incredulously before he puts some up his nostril – and he sneezes, blowing the precious powder all over everything and everybody. Also at the party is a panicked young man who’s on the phone speaking his one line in the film, “I forgot my mantra!” I’d remembered that line – a spoof of the Maharishi and his whole meditation cult – but hadn’t realized until last night that the actor who delivered it was the very young Jeff Goldblum.

Annie Hall has become the archetypal Woody Allen movie, so much so that in 2004 writers Randy Mack and Zack Ordynans and director Van Flesher made a weird spoof of it called Burning Annie, filmed entirely at Marshall University in West Virginia and starring Gary Lundy as Max, a college student whose obsession with Annie Hall is ruining his love life because he insists on showing it to every woman he’s interested in, and they break up with him in similar ways to what Annie and Alvy go through in Annie Hall. The film even named its central character “Max” in imitation of Annie’s pet name for Alvy, and it features a punk band called “Anhedonia.” (Anhedonia – a psychological term meaning the inability to be happy – was Woody Allen’s original working title for Annie Hall.) I hadn’t seen Annie Hall in quite a while, but I had fond memories of it and this time around one of the pleasant surprises is Diane Keaton’s voice. No, she wasn’t one of the golden throats of the 20th century, but she wrapped her voice around a couple of 1920’s and 1930’s standards, “Seems Like Old Times” by Carmen Lombardo (Guy Lombardo’s brother) and John Jacob Loeb, and “It Had to Be You” by Isham Jones and Gus Kahn. She sang in a pleasant, earnest way that reminded me very much of Judy Holliday, while the use of old songs like that offered harbingers of Allen’s marvelous use of music in later films to establish who in the dramatis personae is romantically or sexually compatible with whom. Annie Hall is also the movie that started a short-lived fad for women wearing men’s neckties (Diane Keaton sports one in several sequences) and for adding the words “lah-dee-dah” to the language, reflecting Annie’s devil-may-care attitude about the world that Alvy first finds charming and then finds totally repulsive – especially when Annie gets behind the wheel of her yellow Volkswagen convertible and drives as if watching the road and looking where you’re going were strictly optional. While Annie Hall seems dated in many ways – it’s as old now as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was when producer Bob Evans, director Jack Clayton, screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola and stars Robert Redford and Mia Farrow made an excruciatingly boring movie of it in 1974 – it also holds up surprisingly well and is a testament to the enduring power of Woody Allen’s cinematic genius, whatever you think about the more sordid aspects of his life.

Working Girl (20th Century-Fox, 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The third item on my husband Charles’s and my Turner Classic Movies Academy Award marathon last Sunday, February 16 was Working Girl, a quite good and engaging romantic comedy starring Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill, a brassy young office secretary who lives on Staten Island and takes the Staten Island Ferry every morning to commute to work in Manhattan. Tess also doesn’t want to be a secretary all her life; she’s taking five years of business courses in night school and also going to voice training to shed her ineradicable Brooklyn accent. Griffith was only billed third in this film, after Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver (who was also briefly in Annie Hall as a woman Alvy Singer dates during one of his and Annie’s break-ups), but it’s really her movie. The opening reels of Working Girl come off as a #MeToo movie about a decade early, as Tess is determined to break out of the secretarial pool and show off her potential chops as an investment broker, only she ends up in the back of a limo with a lecherous executive named Lutz (Oliver Platt). Lutz couldn’t be less interested in anything Tess has to say about business; the only thing he cares about is getting into her pants, and after he tries to open a bottle of champagne in the limo and spills it all over her dress, she gets fed up, spritzes Lutz all over with what’s left of the champagne, demands that his driver stop the car, and gets out in high dudgeon. She steps out in the rain with no overcoat on and wearing only high-heeled shoes on her feet (earlier she’d been seen whipping off the tennis shoes she wore when she rode on the Staten Island Ferry and putting on her heels as the footwear she’s expected to wear at work), and she’s in the middle of a driving rainstorm, made even worse when a passing driver zips through a puddle and splashes dirty water all over her. Tess goes to her employment counselor (Olympia Dukakis) and gets told in no uncertain terms that she’s run out of opportunities, and if this next job doesn’t work out for her, there’s no future for her, at least as far as office work in New York City goes.

Tess’s next employer is Trask and Company big-shot executive Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), and Tess breathes a sigh of relief that at least her new boss will be a woman and therefore she won’t hit on her (though I wondered if writer Kevin Wade was going to pull the gag of having Katharine turn out to be a Lesbian predator after Tess’s warm young flesh; fortunately, he didn’t go there). Katharine insists to Tess that she’ll always have her back and will give her full credit for any ideas she brings, and to absolutely no one’s surprise except Tess’s that turns out not to be true. Katharine has a hot, studly client named Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) who represents a company that’s being targeted for a hostile takeover by a Japanese company. Trainer’s bosses have decided that the way to defend themselves against the Japanese corporate raiders is to buy a U.S. TV station, since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doesn’t allow non-U.S. citizens to hold American broadcast licenses. (Rupert Murdoch got around this regulation by simply re-nationalizing as a naturalized U.S. citizen.) But all the available TV stations are simply too expensive. Tess hits on the idea that Trainer’s company could buy a radio network, since radio stations are a lot cheaper and are still covered by the same FCC regulations against foreign ownership as TV stations. But she discovers a note on one of Katharine’s dictation tapes that she’s going to go ahead with the radio recommendation but keep Tess out of the loop so she can steal Tess’s idea and get all the credit for it. Fortunately for Tess, Katharine is laid up by a skiing accident that lands her in a Caribbean hospital for weeks, and Tess pursues the deal, posing as a bigshot executive on her own and meeting with the directors of Trainer’s company. She also gets the hots for Trainer, whom she meets at a party being hosted by Trainer’s executives and gets cruised by him without either of them knowing who the other is. Tess wakes up the next morning in Trainer’s bed, though he assures her that nothing sexual happened between them (a flashback to the old days of the Production Code!).

Eventually the negotiations zoom in on a radio network based in the South and owned by an old man, Armbrister (Robert Easton), who’s fierce about maintaining family ownership, though his kids couldn’t care less. There’s a rival bidder, but Tess manages to charm Armbrister into doing the deal with her – only Katharine arrives back unexpectedly and crashes the meeting where the deal is supposed to be finalized. We also learn, as does Tess, that Jack Trainer has been Katharine’s secret boyfriend all these months, so there’s personal as well as professional jealousy between Katharine and Tess. Katharine immediately fires Tess and she goes back to her office to collect her things – only Trainor runs into her in the hallway. Things get saved for our Nice Girl from Staten Island when she runs across a newspaper article about how the Southern radio network is about to lose its key talent, a typical Right-wing shock jock whose political program is by far the most popular show on its stations. Tess does the deal on her terms and is rewarded by her company’s owner, Oren Trask (Philip Bosco), with an entry-level position in mergers and acquisitions. There are also subplots involving Tess’s best friend from Staten Island, Cyn (Joan Cusack); her boyfriend Bob Speck (a young Kevin Spacey); Tess’s own boyfriend, Mick Dugan (a young Alec Baldwin); and Doreen DiMucci (Elizabeth Whitcraft), whom Tess catches having extra-relational activity with Mick in their own bed. Mick proposes to Tess and Tess says, “Maybe,” but in the end he and Doreen get together after Doreen catches the bouquet at Bob’s and Cyn’s wedding. Eventually Tess gets both her well-to-do dream man and her dream job, though there’s a peculiar little scene at the end in which Tess meets her own secretary in her new job, and we’re not sure whether her secretary will remain loyal or will turn out to be an Eve Harrington-style bitch out to do to Tess what Tess did to Katharine.

There’s a lot of The Solid Gold Cadillac in Working Girl and also a fair amount of Pretty Woman, but I enjoyed it as a neat little rom-com with a Cinderella twist, expertly directed by Mike Nichols from Wade’s quite charming (if a bit predictable) script. Though it was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Griffith and Best Supporting Actress for both Weaver and Cusack, the only Oscar it won was for Carly Simon’s stunning song, “Let the River Run,” which not only is sung on the soundtrack by Simon at both the beginning and end but was used as the basis for Rob Mounsey’s underscoring. I remembered buying the cassette single of the song back when this movie was new, and playing it often, even though I hadn’t actually seen the film until last night, and it won Simon not only the Academy Award for Best Song but also a Golden Globe and a Grammy – the first time a single person had won for the same song in all three categories.

Trapped in the Spotlight (Candour Pictures, Vortex Media, Black Tree Pictures, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 15) I watched a Lifetime movie I was attracted to by the sheer bizarre stupidity of the concept. It was called Trapped in the Spotlight and its plot premise dealt with a two-woman soul duo called Luscious, who broke up abruptly when one of the members, Lupita (Melyssa Ford), got tired of the alcohol abuse and overall diva-esque behavior of her partner Neveah (Monique Coleman) and walked out in the middle of a gig. When that happened the group was three songs away from finishing their album that was supposed to be their ultimate statement as artists, Phoenix. Flash-forward 15 years and Neveah is living alone in a New York City loft she’s about to be evicted from for non-payment of rent. She’s still trying to break back into the music business and she tells her landlady she’s about to have a meeting with a major-label representative and she’ll be able to pay the rent tomorrow from the advance she’s sure she’s going to get – only Quinten (Scott Anthony Cavalheiro), the rather supercilious white executive she’s there to see, won’t hold still long enough to hear her and flatly tells her that her reputation in the industry is not such that anyone’s interested in promoting her comeback. Neveah has a diva-esque hissy-fit that, this being 2025, gets filmed by various people on their smartphones and uploaded to social media. Later, just as Neveah is about to commit suicide by hurling herself out of the open window at her loft, she gets a call back from the white executive. But it’s a trap; he’s been forced at gunpoint to make the call so the crazy Black ex-fan stalker Izaak (Emmanuel Kabongo), who turns out to be the son of the group’s original manager, promoter and record producer, Lenny (Glen Michael Grant), can kidnap her. Izaak has nurtured a dream all these years to get Lupita and Neveah back together and record the last three songs to complete Phoenix (it occurred to me that this would be something like a crazed fan kidnapping Brian Wilson and Mike Love and holding them hostage together until they finished Smile).

To do this he’s set up a fully equipped recording studio inside a warehouse building his father owns, and he kidnaps Lupita as well. Lupita meanwhile had definitively retired from the music business as a condition of being allowed to marry her boyfriend, Marcel (Romaine Waite), and though it’s not clear how either makes their living, they’ve had a daughter, Simone (Eden Cupid), who’s now 10. Though the cubicle inside Lenny’s warehouse looks like a fully equipped recording studio, Izaak is making the actual recordings on a little red hand-held computer device. Lupita, who’s also been kidnapped, and Neveah start recording despite the handicaps imposed by Izaak, including handcuffing them together – he explains that they still have two free arms between them with which they can play keyboards – and chaining them to the floor between takes. (One wonders how they eat or use the bathroom; previous Lifetime villains have at least provided their captives with slop buckets, but not Izaak.) Izaak insists that Neveah have a glass of wine with him to celebrate the impending completion of the album, and though Neveah at first protests, saying she’s been sober for 10 years, ultimately she joins him. When Marcel and Lenny trace the location of Izaak’s home studio, Izaak holds them both captive and, in the film’s most shocking scene, stabs his dad in the chest with a kitchen knife. Ultimately Lupita and Neveah hit on an idea; knowing that Izaak is streaming the songs to the outside world and they’re actually getting a fair number of hits, they decide to sneak a message onto one of the tracks. They work out the Morse code for “S.O.S.” and include it into the rhythm of one of the songs, and also insert a backward-masked lyric revealing their location.

The clues are worked out by Lupita’s daughter Simone and her babysitter Roxanne (Sammi Jo Higgins), a college student and the only other white character in the film besides Quinten. Unfortunately, Izaak finds the torn piece of paper on which Lupita and Neveah wrote the lyric giving away their location, and it’s a race against time whether the police can find them before Izaak kills everybody – which he’s planning to do by pouring gasoline around the recording cubicle and setting it on fire. Ultimately the cops arrive in time to rescue everybody Izaak has been holding captive, while he’s taken into custody (or did he die in the fire? I’m not sure) and the little red recorder on which he was taking down Luscious’s last songs burns in the fire. (That seemed a bit of a “cheat” to me because the files for the songs would exist in the servers of the streaming services to which Izaak uploaded them.) Trapped in the Spotlight was directed by Nicole G. Leier – who actually does a pretty good job within the limits of the absurd script – but there are no fewer than four credited writers: Derick Ackerley, Jag Gill, Alberto Halfeld, and René Rodriguez-Lopez. Aside from offering more proof of my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers, those people should be deeply ashamed of themselves!

Strange Illusion, a.k.a. Out of the Night (PRC, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 14) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie on YouTube that I’d seen before. It’s listed as Strange Illusion but it was also released as Out of the Night (it’s on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWamErNN_LE without hard-coded English subtitles, which Charles and I had to deal with when we watched the film last night on a different YouTube post). I’ve often named it as one of the five best films ever made by PRC, which officially stood for Producers’ Releasing Corporation but which put out so many dreadful, boring films the joke around Hollywood was the initials really meant “Pretty Rotten Crap.” It was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, Fritz Lang’s former art director, who came to the U.S. in 1930 (three years before the Nazis took over Germany) and got a big chance at Universal directing Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in their first film together, The Black Cat (1934). Alas, he blew his chance by falling in love with his script girl (today the job title is “continuity person” and the job is to make sure that, for example, if an actor was wearing his hat in the long shot he wears it again in his close-up), Shirley Castle, not realizing that Universal Studios production chief Carl Laemmle, Jr. was also interested in her. While Ulmer and Shirley Castle got married and stayed together the rest of his life (her credit can be seen as Shirley Ulmer on almost all his later films), the incident cost him his potential for a major-studio career and relegated him to independent productions (including an anti-syphilis movie from 1933 called Damaged Lives that was produced secretly by Columbia under the studio pseudonym “Weldon Productions”), Yiddish-language films shot in New York, and, after 1942, work for PRC. Ulmer “made his bones” at the Little Studio That Could with a women’s-prison melodrama called Girls in Chains and went on to do Jive Junction, a reworking of the 1940 Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland/Busby Berkeley musical Strike Up the Band, before making the trio of high-quality films on which his reputation rests: Bluebeard (1944), Strange Illusion a.k.a. Out of the Night (1945), and Detour (1946). The other two PRC films on my five all-time best list are Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House (1944) and Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp (1945) – all made by foreign-born directors.

Strange Illusion was written by Adele Commandini (whose last name in this credit is shorn of one of its “m”’s) based on a supposedly “original” story by Fritz Rotter, though it’s clear that the real source is William Shakespeare’s (and Thomas Kyd’s before him!) Hamlet. (Commandini seems an odd choice to write this film given that her best-known previous credit is for Three Smart Girls, the 1936 Universal musical that made Deanna Durbin a star.) In this film the Hamlet equivalent is Paul Cartwright (James Lydon, who in the 1930’s had been the teenage male lead in Paramount’s Aldrich family films, their attempt to compete with the Hardy family at MGM – so Lydon was basically their Mickey Rooney), a college student majoring in criminology so he can follow in the footsteps of his late father, an attorney turned judge. The elder Cartwright was killed in an accident when his car was run over by a train right after it had an accident with a truck that knocked it onto the path of the train in the first place (illustrated with some very fake-looking model work on an ultra-limited PRC budget). But Paul is convinced that his dad was murdered, especially when he receives a letter from his late father, one of several missives he left with his own lawyers to be sent to his son in case of his death (the equivalent of Hamlet’s ghost in the play). This particular letter warns Paul not to let his mother Virginia (Sally Eilers, who’s quite good) get mixed up with any fortune-hunters, and Paul takes his late dad’s advice to heart when Virginia hooks up with a slimy-looking man named Brett Curtis (Warren William). Paul and his best friend George Hanover (Jimmy Clark), who’s been dating Paul’s sister Dorothy (Jayne Hazard), take an instant dislike to Brett immediately, though Dorothy is enthralled by him and forms a schoolgirl crush on him, telling George that she no longer considers him “sophisticated” enough for her. Paul also has a girlfriend, Lydia (Mary McLeod, who looks so much like Jayne Hazard it’s often hard to tell them apart), who sort of hangs around the back of the action. Midway through the movie Paul decides that “Brett Curtis” is actually the criminal Claude Barrington, who figured prominently in his dad’s files as the crook he was most angry he’d never managed to catch.

Not only is “Curtis” really Barrington, he has an ally in Professor Muhlbach (Charles Arnt), who runs the local mental hospital. When Paul seems to be getting too close to the truth for their comfort, Muhlbach has him committed to his asylum and keeps him there against his will. Meanwhile, Paul has lifted a fingerprint of the mysterious “Brett Curtis” off a glass he used and sent it to the local cops, who in turn submit it to the FBI for analysis and comparison. The authorities have “Brett”’s thumbprint on file because, though he insists that he’s never learned to drive after a childhood accident in which he was a passenger in a car that crashed, we see him get behind the wheel and drive off in a car belonging to one of his previous victims. For years Barrington, like Chaplin’s Henri Verdoux, has been marrying rich women, knocking them off and grabbing their fortunes as seemingly legitimate inheritances. He was also behind the murder of Paul’s father, driving the truck on the fatal night and crashing it into the train tracks. Muhlbach gives Paul a tour of the roof of the asylum and seemingly gets him set up to be pushed off the roof to his death – but another staff member interrupts and Paul discovers an old barn that was once occupied by Barrington a.k.a. “Curtis.” He and his confidant, Dr. Vincent (Regis Toomey, playing a good guy for a change!), explore the barn and find the door of the truck that says, “Acme Trucking Company” (which made both Charles and I chuckle over the usual record of Acme products in the Road Runner cartoons). Dr. Vincent loads the door into the trunk of his car and drives off to present it as evidence to the police, and to my surprise Muhlbach doesn’t try to run Dr. Vincent off the road and force him to crash so the telltale evidence will never reach the cops. Instead they are able to identify “Curtis” as Barrington judging from the thumbprint he had to give when he applied for a California drivers’ license and the blood spatter he left on the truck once he killed the real Brett Curtis to steal his identity.

While the basic story outline is strikingly similar to Hamlet, there are also some differences: Brett is not Paul’s uncle, and contrary to Hamlet’s fabled indecisiveness, Paul is clear from the get-go that he wants to expose Brett as the killer of his dad and make sure he’s sent to jail. Visually, Strange Illusion is an uneven film; there are scenes that are shot and lit plainly (the cinematographer is Philip Tannura) and other scenes that approach film noir. I wish Ulmer or someone in the production crew could have toned down James Lydon’s golly-gee-whillikers affectations as Paul, which get annoying in several scenes even while there are scenes in which Lydon turns in a powerfully restrained acting job and becomes stronger and more moving because of it. And the last time I watched this film I couldn’t help but wince at the sheer banality of Warren William’s exit line as “Curtis,” t/n Barrington, is arrested: “You meddling fool!” Yes, I know we couldn’t have expected Adele Commandini to come up with anything as good as Shakespeare, but still … This time I also found myself wishing that Peter Cookson could have played Paul; the year after Strange Illusion Cookson found himself at Monogram making a quite similar modern-dress updating of a public-domain classic, Fear (based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment), and turned in a much more understated performance. Ironically, Fear also co-starred Warren William, though not as the villain but in a basically sympathetic role as the police officer who’s out to prove Cookson guilty of murdering a university professor who moonlights as a loan shark taking advantage of his students when they’re in financial need. But despite the crude effects work and the flaws in Lydon’s performance, Strange Illusion is a marvelous little movie that showed off Ulmer’s Gothic imagination, especially in the opening scene (repeated at the end more optimistically once Paul, his mother and his girlfriend are out of the clutches of the dastardly Barrington) which anticipates the story and represents Paul’s dream, only it’s more than a dream because much of it comes true in the story we are about to see. It makes no literal sense that Paul would be dreaming of places he’s never seen and people he’s never met before, but it doesn’t matter – and it’s welcome that at least Rotter and Commandini avoided the mistake Fear’s co-writers, Alfred Zeisler (who also directed) and Dennis Cooper, made of having the entire plot turn out to be the central character’s dream!

Law and Order: "Duty to Protect" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 13, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 13) I went home from a dinner party with my husband Charles and his half-sister to watch Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Elsbeth on TV. The Law and Order episode, “Duty to Protect,” was a chilling tale about a 17-year-old girl named Carrie Lawson who emancipated herself and moved into her own apartment. Her mother is Michelle Burns (Abigail Spencer), a well-known filmmaker who specializes in stories about female empowerment and in particular about women who escape abusive relationships with men. Her (adoptive) father is Michelle’s husband, Ron Lawson (J. Anthony Crane). It’s unclear what – if anything – he does for a living, but he legally did a second-parent adoption of Carrie. After a few red-herring suspects, including a 17-year-old boy who was found with a piece of Carrie’s jewelry in his possession (he says he just found it on the street, and a surveillance camera proves it), the police zero in on Ron Lawson as Carrie’s killer. But they have no idea of his motive until a video surfaces that Carrie filmed the day she was killed in which she says Ron sexually molested her regularly from the time she was 10 until she moved out. Carrie had threatened to release this video on social media, and Ron killed her after he demanded she not do that and she insisted she would anyway. The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), indict Ron and win a $20 million bail award – which Michelle pays for him. The trial is just getting underway when Carrie’s last-word video is shown in court – and Ron responds by overpowering one of the court bailiffs, stealing his gun and shooting himself with it. Director David Grossman, working from a script by old Law and Order hands Rick Eid and Pamela J. Wechsler, gives us an extreme close-up of the bullet entry wound on Ron’s forehead just to make it clear to us that he did kill himself instead of just wounding himself and leaving open the possibility that he could recover and the police and prosecutors would have the task of deciding whether or not still to prosecute him once he was well enough to stand trial again.

With half the show’s running time still to go when Ron offs himself, both Charles and I wondered how they were going to keep the show moving to the end – which they did by indicting Michelle for criminally negligent homicide, especially since Michelle actually told Ron that Carrie had made the video incriminating him and was planning to release it on social media. Much of what they knew about the case comes from Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), boss of the principal police investigators on the case, who wormed it out of Michelle in what Michelle thought was a quiet, calm woman-to-woman talk until Lt. Brady metaphorically brought the hammer on her and arrested her for the murder. Later it develops that Michelle herself was sexually abused as a child (the vampire theory of molestation strikes again!), and Nolan, Samantha and their boss, district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), argue over the morals of taking a woman to trial who’s as much a victim as a perpetrator. Ultimately they cut a plea deal with her in which she gets a one-year sentence instead of the 15-to-life she would have drawn for a conviction. I wish the writers would have done more about the contradiction of Michelle’s character – between her status as an artist who makes films about female empowerment (including one that has a life-imitates-art commonality with the real-life crime) and her willingness to remain in a marriage with a man who sexually exploited her daughter as well as beat her regularly. I also wish they’d done more about what her film fans would think of her after the real revelations of the case. But then I’d just watched the Lifetime TV documentary Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive, a real-life case of a woman who became identified with female empowerment through her best-known song while simultaneously remaining in an abusive marriage for 25 years, so perhaps the plot of this Law and Order wasn’t as far-fetched as it seemed while I was watching it.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Calculated" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 13, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Calculated,” was just as chilling in its own way even though it did a couple of swerves in direction over its running time. It begins with a high-school student named Leah Hayward (Victoria Russell) whose friend Eli Sanders (Theodore Olsen-Johnson) receives a text containing a photo of Leah’s bare chest. The school principal catches him with the tittie text on his phone and reports it to the police, threatening disciplinary action against him that will end his chances to get into an elite college. The Special Victims Unit detectives investigate and find that there’s a whole selection of sexually explicit photos of high-school students online. They try to find who could have had access to all these pics and the name they come up with is Adam Parker (Jared Canfield), who’s a college admissions counselor. He’s the sort of person parents hire if they’re worried about their kids getting into elite colleges and need paid-for help to get them through the entrance process and in particular to coach them on writing their application essays. Parker has also developed a side hustle of sending lonely teen kids texts, posing as fellow students they already knew, and extracting sexually explicit photos of them he then sells to a secret network of pedophiles on the “dark Web.” Parker offers to rat out his customers in exchange for a lower sentence for his own crimes, insisting he’s not a pedophile himself but simply a capitalist making money off them. Leah Hayward’s mother Sharon (Kelly Frye) isn’t helping matters much with her insistence that the cops not only bust the people who took advantage of her daughter online but make sure every copy of the Internet image of her breasts is erased. The SVU officers actually tell her they’ve done that, but anyone who knows anything about the Internet is thinking, “Yeah, right.”

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and the assistant assigned to SVU, Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), set up a sting operation with the SVU cops to attract various pedophiles to a rendezvous at the Baronet Hotel, where they’ll arrive thinking they’re going to get to have sex with underage partners and they’ll really be arrested. The cops pick Detective Kate Silva (Juliana Aidén Martinez) to act as the decoy, presumably because she’s the youngest member of the force. For some reason they set the number 50 as their quota of pedophiles they must bust to make the operation worthwhile, but Detective Silva has second thoughts about one of the people caught up in the sting. He’s Matthew Daly (Nik Sharp), and though he’s 32 years old he’s developmentally disabled (or whatever the au courant euphemism is for the “R”-word). When Silva, in her persona as a young girl named “Amy,” asked him to bring condoms (required as the sine qua non to prove intent – which suggests that one of the pedophiles could have escaped justice simply by insisting that he wasn’t going to use them and was going to go bareback), Matthew asks, “What’s a condom?” Silva texts him back (they’re communicating through a Web site consisting of animated avatars for the users) that he can get them at any deli (which struck me as odd because if I were in the market for condoms I’d go to a drugstore, not a deli). When Matthew gets busted he sees Silva in the police station and says, “Hi, Amy!” He has no idea either that she’s busted him or what he’s been busted for. Eventually Silva and her boss, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), get D.A. Baxter to drop the charges against Matthew because he clearly isn’t guilty of anything more than making a friend online – he doesn’t even know what sex is, let alone wanting to have any with a presumably underage girl – though they literally have to ambush him in his chauffeur-driven SUV in a parking lot to get him the case file. This episode suffered from a couple of really severe turns in the plot line, but it was also a good warning for teenagers perhaps too willing to trust any potential predators online simply because they’ve assumed the identity of people they know, or think they know, well.