Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1939)

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

Last night (Monday, March 31) my husband Charles and I had a nice dinner “out” at Gnarly Girl Pizza, and as we were wrapping up and preparing to head home, he asked me if I had a movie I wanted to watch. Given that we’d just watched footage of U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) starting his real-life filibuster to protest the Trump administration in general and Elon Musk’s firings of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and unilaterally shutting down entire federal agencies, I said, “I think I’m going to let Cory Booker pick our movie tonight.” Of course I was referring to Frank Capra’s classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), written by Sidney Buchman (so the director was a Republican and the writer a Communist – and not just an unfairly scapegoated liberal or Leftist but the real hammer-and-sickle McCoy) and starring James Stewart as Jefferson Smith. Smith is the leader of a Boy Scouts knockoff called the “Boy Rangers” when he’s suddenly catapulted into the limelight when Governor Hubert “Happy” Hopper (Guy Kibbee) appoints him to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate following the sudden death of an incumbent. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was based on The Gentleman from Montana by Lewis R. Foster, which depending on your source was either an original screen story (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gave Foster the only Oscar this film won), an out-of-print novel (Capra’s autobiography), or a novel never published at all (Wikipedia). Though Foster’s title makes clear what state Jefferson Smith is from, and at the gala premiere in Washington, D.C. Capra and his wife Lucille shared a box with U.S. Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-Montana) and his wife Lulu, the film never quite comes out and says what state Smith is from. Capra gravitated to Foster’s book when his plan to make a biopic of Chopin failed because of his insistence that Marlene Dietrich at the height of her “box-office poison” infamy play George Sand – Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn vetoed her (though he revived the Chopin project in 1945 as A Song to Remember with Charles Vidor directing, Buchman as screenwriter, Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Merle Oberon as Sand).

He got a story that was a “natural” follow-up to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and featured a large cast of characters: 24 credited roles and 189 uncredited ones, according to imdb.com. When Governor Hooper is undecided as to whether to fill the vacant Senate seat with party hack Horace Miller, the man machine boss Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) orders him to pick, or a crusading journalist named Hill (the choice of the voters who flock to his office and lobby him about the appointment in a scene that, like much of this film, looks all too current today), he decides to toss a coin. When the coin lands on its side, propped up by a folded newspaper on the floor, Hopper decides to appoint neither but instead take his children’s suggestion and pick Jefferson Smith. Taylor and his protégé, senior U.S. Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), nicknamed the “Silver Knight” by Taylor’s publicity apparatus, are horrified because they plan to have a dam built on Willitt Creek in the northern region of their state. They’ve been secretly buying up the property around Willitt Creek for two years under phony names so they can make a killing when the dam project is finally authorized by Congress, which is a virtual certainty because they’ve sneaked it into a must-pass piece of legislation called the “Deficiency Bill.” (Today I think it would be called “budget reconciliation.”) They’re convinced that Smith is so naïve they’ll be able to sneak the project through because Smith is in awe of Paine and will vote however he tells him to – a relationship that goes back to Smith’s father, Clayton Smith, a newspaper editor and former friend of Paine’s until he was shot in the back by a mining company goon squad for supporting a miners’ strike. What they don’t realize is that Smith has an idea for a national boys’ camp in his state, and he’s picked Willitt Creek for its site. With the help of Saunders (Jean Arthur, top-billed – which amused Charles), a holdover from the late previous Senator whom Smith is replacing and who appears to be his only staff person, Smith drafts a bill for his national boys’ camp at Willitt Creek. The next day he’s called away from the Senate by Paine’s daughter Susan (Astrid Allwyn), who takes him to a reception for a princess so Smith won’t be on the Senate floor when the Deficiency Bill, including the provision for the Willitt Creek Dam, is read.

When Smith hears about the dam he’s outraged, but he’s sandbagged on the floor by Senator Paine. Assigned by the Taylor political machine that essentially owns him to destroy Smith by any means necessary, Paine presents forged documents that make it appear that Smith himself owns the land on either side of Willitt Creek and would profit personally by the government’s purchase of it. Paine demands that the Senate expel Smith, and the case is referred to the Committee on Privileges and Elections (today it’s called the Ethics Committee). Smith is so hurt by the nasty things that are being said about him in the Committee, including by people back home he thought were his friends, that rather than mount a defense he storms out of the hearing room and disappears. Saunders, who by now is in love with him, guesses he’s at the Lincoln Memorial and tells him to fight back. Whatever she tells him we don’t hear, but the next day on the Senate floor Smith starts a one-person filibuster, egged on by Saunders, two reporters in the press gallery – Saunders’s non-serious sort-of boyfriend Diz Moore (Thomas Mitchell, who had a busy 1939 since he was also in Gone With the Wind and Stagecoach) and Sweeney Farrell (an uncredited but easily recognizable Jack Carson) – and ultimately the vice-president (Harry Carey, whose homespun eloquence makes him unforgettable in the role), he holds the floor for nearly 24 hours, taking up time by reading the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution (well, it’s better than Green Eggs and Ham, the children’s book Ted Cruz read on his filibuster to hold up a government-funding bill that included money for the Affordable Care Act; Cruz explained that he read Green Eggs and Ham because his kids would get a kick out of hearing dad read it on C-SPAN, but it was an ironic choice given that Dr. Seuss wrote a fable denouncing closed-mindedness and Cruz’s filibuster was closed-mindedness personified) and ultimately ending up hoarse from speaking and staying on his feet for nearly 24 hours. (In his autobiography Capra said he helped Stewart with this part of his performance by calling in a throat specialist to give him a preparation that would make him more hoarse. The doctor was amused because usually his job was to make people less hoarse.)

Smith is hoping that word of what he’s saying will be reported back home and people will come to his defense, but Taylor has such total control of the mainstream media in his state that he’s able to fill it with anti-Smith propaganda and thousands of people write letters urging Smith to stop the filibuster and resign. Members of the Boys’ Rangers try to answer the charges in their own hand-typeset, letterpress-printed paper Boys’ Stuff, but Taylor’s goons literally seize their papers and run their wagons off the road – something that especially struck me when I first saw this film in the early 1970’s; its scenes of authority figures violently suppressing peaceful protests rang all too true after the massacres at Kent and Jackson State. Paine, who all through the movie has been having crises of conscience but has gone along with Taylor at every turn after Taylor promised him his support for a Presidential run, brings in huge baskets of anti-Smith letters, and Smith reads a few of them and becomes so demoralized he faints and collapses on the Senate floor. Then Paine’s will breaks; he loses it completely, admits on the floor that Smith was right all along: the Willitt Creek Dam was nothing but a piece of graft to fatten the pockets of Taylor and his gang, and says if anybody should be expelled from the Senate it should be he, not Smith. Then Paine bursts into the Senate hallway and fires two shots in an attempt at suicide – one of the bullets breaks a lamp cover in the hallway and when I first saw the scene (at a 1970 San Francisco Film Festival Capra retrospective at which the man spoke himself) I had thought Paine was attempting suicide either by slashing his arms with the lamp glass or by smashing a fixture and inhaling lighting gas. (Did they still have gaslights in the U.S. Senate in 1939?) Ultimately Smith is vindicated and he and Saunders – whose first name, “Clarissa,” he’s wormed out of her in an earlier scene – get together for a final clinch.

One scene of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington so impressed me I even had a chance to re-create it; it’s the scene in which a boy, visiting the Lincoln Memorial with his grandfather, reads him Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural from the carvings at the Memorial. I got to reproduce this scene in 1987, when I was in D.C. for the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. I traveled there with a Gay couple from San Diego, one of whom was blind, and when we visited the Lincoln Memorial I got to read him Lincoln’s words from the monument’s carvings just as the boy did in Capra’s film. Though Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was widely criticized in 1939 for allegedly making democracy look ridiculous and giving Fascists and Communists ammunition for their propaganda against it, Capra was particularly proud that in 1942, when the Nazis ordered their puppet French government at Vichy to stop showing American films, many theatre owners picked Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as the last U.S. film they would show before the ban went into effect. Today, as the U.S. is once again threatened by Right-wingers both at home and abroad, the message of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington couldn’t be more timely – and watching it as Cory Booker was essentially duplicating the fictional Jefferson Smith’s heroism on the real Senate floor just gave it that much more punch. Oddly, Charles told me after it ended that he’d never seen it start to finish before – which I find a bit hard to believe; I’m pretty sure I’d shown it to him in the 1990’s in the days in which I was making VHS tapes off TCM literally by the yard – but it’s clear the film made the same impact on him that it always has on me.

One thing that’s long struck me about Capra is that as his career progressed, it was harder and harder for him to find happy endings for his films. He made a succession of movies with Edward Arnold as his principal villain – You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941) – and, as one critic pointed out, Arnold’s characters became more powerful and more unscrupulous with each new film. In You Can’t Take It With You Capra and writer Robert Riskin, adapting a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, ended it with Arnold’s character regaining his humanity by playing harmonica duets with Lionel Barrymore. In Mr. Smith there’s that preposterous scene of Claude Rains literally having his breakdown on the Senate floor. In Meet John Doe, Arnold’s character is a press baron – in the film’s opening scene, he’s shown having the façade of the building housing The Bulletin, the newspaper he’s just bought as a vehicle for his political ambitions, jackhammered to remove its stated commitment to truth and a free press and instead proclaiming itself “A Streamlined Paper for a Streamlined Era” (an eerie anticipation of what Elon Musk would do with his various enterprises, first Twitter and now agencies of the U.S. government) – who seeks to use his media holdings to become dictator of the entire U.S. Like his younger contemporary, Orson Welles, Capra was clearly fearful of the power of the media not only to report the news but to shape people’s perceptions of it and the reality in which they live. In Meet John Doe Capra actually shot five different endings, looking in vain for one that would work; and in his first post-war film, It’s a Wonderful Life, to get his happy ending Capra literally had to resort to divine intervention. And there’s an interesting connection between this film and the Bible: two of the actors in it worked on Biblical projects. The Senate Majority Leader is played by H. B. Warner, Jesus Christ in the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille biopic The King of Kings (1927), while Edward Arnold narrated the fascinating 1945 multi-composer recording Genesis Suite.

You, the People (MGM, 1940)

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

Two nights ago (Sunday, March 31) my husband Charles and I had watched an intriguing 20-minute short on Turner Classic Movies called You, the People, a 1940 “Crime Does Not Pay” series entry, directed by Roy Rowland from a script by Douglas Foster, in which an actor, Robert Elliott, introduces the film by representing himself as an attorney general from a (not specified, and probably fictitious) Midwestern state. (For some reason screenwriter Foster named this character “Edward Gibbon,” after the famous author who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) He announces that the crime it’s going to deal with is election fraud, and specifically the attempt by political machine boss Bailey (C. Henry Gordon) and his stooge, Mayor James Wheelock (Paul Everett), to stay in power against the challenge of a reform candidate, Frank Y. Carter (John Hamilton). I suspect the writer had Tom Prendergast’s legendarily corrupt machine in Kansas City, Missouri in mind. Among Bailey’s tactics are extorting campaign contributions from city employees as well as small businesspeople by threatening them if they don’t comply (telling city workers who don’t contribute they’ll be fired and making the familiar “protection racket” threats against the business owners); forging fake ballots with votes for Wheelock already pre-cast; starting rumors that Carter is himself as corrupt and machine-controlled as Wheelock to drive down turnout overall; and, when all else fails, literally setting fire to the ballots and the warehouse containing them so they can’t be checked for authenticity and inspected for the minute details of difference between the phony ballots and the real ones.

You, the People suffers, like so many other films of its time, from the fact that classic Hollywood knew only one way to depict urban evil: the corrupt political bosses in this short act the same ways the gangsters had acted in 1930’s movies, the Nazi Fifth Columnists would in the 1940’s, and the equally malevolent (if not more so) Communists in the early-1950’s films that enjoyed a brief vogue as Hollywood tried to suck up to the House Un-American Activities Committee by making them. But seen today it’s a chilling reminder of how relatively easy it was – and still is – to rig elections. It’s also a timely depiction of how often both sides in an American election claim “Fraud!” whenever they lose. Donald Trump and his minions made up an elaborate set of phony claims after Joe Biden beat him in 2020; that Trump actually won in a landslide, which he didn’t. Trump’s masses rallied to his call to “Stop the Steal!” and staged a riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to stop Biden from being formally elected as President by any means necessary, including violence. The Biden administration slowly and reluctantly tried to prosecute at least some of the rioters; Trump gave them all a blanket pardon when he regained the Presidency, creating a cadre of people who’d already shown a willingness to commit political violence on his behalf and many of whom went on social media to boast about their willingness to do it again. This is one reason why there’s been so little resistance to Trump’s agenda among Republican officeholders; either they’re on board with Trump’s anti-democratic “MAGA” agenda or they’re in fear for their own or their families’ lives if they stand up to him. And it’s not just the Republicans who try to sow distrust in the outcomes of elections that go against them; in both 2004 and 2024 – the only Presidential elections since 1988 in which Republicans have won pluralities of the popular vote – Democrats have tried to explain away their losses with the same kinds of statistical B.S. Republicans used in 2020.

Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope (Science North, Cosmic Picture Distribution, 2023)

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

On Sunday afternoon, March 30, my husband Charles and I went to the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park after the regular Sunday afternoon organ concert and saw Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope, a 2023 vest-pocket documentary issued in both 45-minute and 25-minute versions. (We saw the shorter one.) Written and directed by David Lickley, Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope is framed around footage of Goodall, the legendary primatologist who in the early 1960’s went to Tanzania, lived with chimpanzees, established that they used tools (which previously had been thought to be the key line separating humans from other primates), and starred in a National Geographic TV special in which the narrator announced at the end that if Goodall was right, we’d either have to redefine “human,” redefine “tool,” or accept chimps as human. A much older and more wizened Goodall is shown giving a lecture at the University of Arizona (in a hall that I’m guessing is usually used for rock or pop music concerts, since one of the stage entrances has a black front door with a white outline of an acoustic guitar painted on it), but the main agenda of the movie is to tell stories from around the world of people intervening in potential environmental catastrophes and either mitigating or actually reversing them. One is the site of a former nickel mine in Sudbury, Canada whose emissions severely polluted a nearby lake and, among other things, generated acid rain and almost totally killed off the local population of loons, a water-dwelling bird. A group of environmentalists launched what they called the “Regreening Project,” first sowing the land around the former nickel mine with ground-up limestone to neutralize the harmful effects of the effluent, then replanting trees once the land was sufficiently rehabilitated it could support them again.

Another of Goodall’s hopeful stores was the return of buffalo to Native American lands following their near-total extermination in the late 19th century. This is a story told in even more detail in Ken Burns’s four-hour documentary The American Buffalo, which I wrote about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-american-buffalo-part-1-bloody.html, and though it’s unclear whether white Americans deliberately set out to exterminate the buffalo as part of their genocidal campaign against the Native population or the buffalo simply fell to a clash of cultures, Burns included this chilling justification from President Theodore Roosevelt’s book on the buffalo: “While the slaughter of the buffalo has been in places needless and brutal, and while it is to be greatly regretted that the species is likely to become extinct, it must be remembered that its destruction was the condition necessary for the advance of White civilization in the West. Above all, the extermination of the buffalo was the only way of solving the Indian question … and its disappearance was the only method of forcing them to at least partially abandon their savage mode of life.” One of the ways the buffalo were preserved was some of the surviving herds were taken to Canada and cared for there (it’s interesting that so many of these stories portray Canada as a place of unique enlightenment, especially at a time when President Donald Trump has set out either to destroy Canada economically or force it to become part of the United States!), and now they’re slowly being reintroduced into the Great Plains with the help of Blackfeet Natives like Ervin Carlson and Cristina Momorucci, both of whom appear in the film. The third story is the reintroduction of the ibis, another bird species, to its former home in Austria and Italy, including astonishing footage of powered paragliders flying alongside the birds to help them relearn their former routes of migration. Lickley and his team were as environmentally conscious off screen as they were on it; according to the Wikipedia page on the film, “The production team undertook significant efforts to work in a sustainable and environmentally-friendly way, such as working with local crews to minimize the number of people who had to travel to each location, and careful planning to ensure that all waste materials generated by the production were recycled, inclusive of being prepared to bring any waste back to Canada for recycling if it could not be recycled locally.”

The Lady in Question (Columbia, 1940)

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

The last film I wanted to catch up with on moviemagg was The Lady in Question, a 1940 farce from Columbia starring Brian Aherne as André Morestan, owner of a French shop selling bicycles, record players, and records. My husband Charles and I watched this on Turner Classic Movies on Sunday, March 30 as part of a double bill with the 1927 silent classic It, written by Hope Loring and Louis M. Lighton based on a story by Elinor Glyn – a 1920’s celebrity who appears as herself in the film and who also wrote a novel called It, though the plots of the book and the movie are totally different and Glyn said the book It was “a character study of a story which the people in the picture read and discuss.” I’ve already written about It from the Balboa Park Silent Movie Night showing in 2008 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2008/08/it-paramount-1927.html), and that pretty much reflects how I feel about it now. The Lady in Question gave Aherne the sort of role he’d long wanted, a middle-aged father figure with two teenage children, Pierre (Glenn Ford, who was 24 when he made this but still looks like he just graduated from high school) and Françoise (Evelyn Keyes). André’s life takes a dramatic turn when he’s summoned to serve on a jury, and while at first he’s just an alternate he’s seated as a full juror when one of the panel has a heart attack and has to withdraw from the trial. The defendant is Natalie Roguin (Rita Hayworth, just coming into her own as both an actress and a sex goddess), who’s accused of killing her former boyfriend. She claims she acted in self-defense after the much older man she’d met on the street turned violently against her one day. In the first half-hour, this film eerily anticipates 12 Angry Men as André manages to persuade the other jurors to acquit Natalie. Then, since Natalie has been homeless since the man’s death, André agrees to take her in and put her to work in his store, but tells her to use the alias “Jeanne” so people don’t associate her with the notorious Natalie Roguin. André’s wife Michelle (Irene Rich) is naturally not happy about this arrangement, not so much because she doesn’t trust her husband but she’s worried about “what people will say.” She’s also upset by Natalie’s clumsiness and how much money it’s cost the store for all the items she breaks.

As for Pierre, he falls instantly in love with Natalie – all the others accept her as “Jeanne,” but because Pierre attended some of the trial sessions so he could watch his dad be a juror, he knows very well who she is. Meanwhile, Pierre’s sister Françoise is dating a man named Robert LaCoste (Edward Norris), though when he also makes a pass at Natalie we know, even before she does, that he’s no good. There’s also a running gag with a male customer who keeps returning the tandem bike he’s bought at André’s shop and exchanging it for a single, then returning to ask for the tandem back, based on the ups and downs of his love life. At one point André takes Natalie back into the storeroom of the store to talk to her privately about her situation, and Pierre sees them through the storeroom window. Instantly Pierre thinks the worst and gets jealous of his dad, but ultimately it all ends with all three couples on tandem bikes: Pierre and Natalie, André and Michelle, and Françoise with the man who kept trading bikes and has finally become her lover at long last. There’s also a quarrelsome juror who keeps coming around to André’s shop and pestering him because he thinks Natalie was really guilty, but eventually new evidence is discovered: a letter in the victim’s own handwriting stating that he intended to kill first Natalie and then himself. The Lady in Question was directed by Charles Vidor – who six years later would reunite with Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford for a far more famous and sexually charged movie, Gilda – from a script by Lewis Meltzer based on a 1937 French film called Gribouille (which Google Translate renders as “Scribble”), released in the English-speaking world as Heart of Paris, directed by Marc Allégret from a story by Marcel Achard and Jan Lustig and starring Raimu, Michèle Morgan, and Gilbert Gil in the roles played by Aherne, Hayworth, and Ford, respectively. While the French version might be more entertaining if only because we’d be hearing the actors playing French people actually speaking French instead of English with bad French accents, The Lady in Question is a quite charming little film. In his intro, Ben Mankiewicz said that Brian Aherne actually fought for the role as a change of pace from all the romantic leading men he’d been playing – quite the opposite from most leading men, who would insist on playing the young, sexy lover long after they were too old to do so!

Wife Stalker (Swirl Films, GroupM Motion Entertainment, Röhm-Feifer Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 29) I watched what promised to be a pretty standard Lifetime movie called Wife Stalker, produced by a plethora of companies affiliated with the Johnson Production Group, directed by Elisabeth Röhm (whose experience playing Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn on Law and Order has obviously stood her in good stead as a thriller director for Lifetime) from a script by Barbara Marshall based on a novel called The Wife Stalker (note the article) by sisters Lynne and Valerie Constantine. The Constantines sign their books with the joint pseudonym “Liv Constantine,” mashing up their real first names, and they apparently specialize in these sorts of dark family tales. For the first hour and 55 minutes Wife Stalker seemed like a pretty generic Lifetime movie (my husband Charles got home from work early and watched all but the first half-hour of it with me). Hot-shot successful divorce attorney Leo Drake (Trai Byers, a hot hunk of Black man-meat I was looking forward to seeing in a soft-core porn scene – and, blessedly, I was not disappointed!) is apparently happily married to Joanna (Keshia Knight Pulliam) and is living in a large home in Atlanta, Georgia with him and two children, Evie (Alayna Bernard) and Aaron (A. J. Bernard). Only their relationship is suddenly broken up when, as part of a case he’s working on, Leo goes to see a yoga instructor and meditation counselor named Piper Reynaud (Grace Byers, Trai Byers’s real-life wife). He wants her to testify as a character witness for a client who’s fighting his ex in court to maintain custody of their kids, but even before the first commercial break, they’re seeing each other on a dinner date, she’s heavily cruising him, he’s giving in, and ultimately they end up having sex. Leo is so obsessed with Piper that he immediately decides he wants out of his relationship with Joanna so he can marry Piper. Naturally Joanna is upset, so she starts stalking Piper, having looked up her last name and found it’s also the name of a legendary fox-like creature in medieval France who specialized in breaking up other people’s marriages.

Joanna gets her first clue when she sees a man named Brent (Eric Tiede, a white guy whom I thought was even sexier than Trai Byers; director Röhm gave us lots of nice mid-shots of him showing off his ample and impressive basket, though alas he appears in just that one scene). Brent addresses Piper as if he knows her but calls her by another name, “Pamela Dunn,” and it’s Joanna’s (and our) first clue that “Piper” is not who she seems. Ultimately Joanna traces Pamela a.k.a. “Piper” across the country to San Diego; Annapolis, Maryland; and Washington, D.C. It turns out her original name was Pamela Rayfield and her first husband was Eric Sherwood, only they and Eric’s child from a previous marriage went on a hiking trip, the kid died, Eric ended up in a coma and Pamela survived unscathed. Joanna hears this story from Eric’s mother Trisha (Deja Dee) and gets to see Eric in a coma in the guest house Trisha built for him. When Joanna asks the comatose Eric to squeeze her hand if Pamela disabled him and killed his kid, he does so violently and Trisha has to separate them. Pamela later made her way to San Diego, joined the local yacht club, bought a sailboat and got married again to local politician Matthew Dunn, only that abruptly ended when the boat “accidentally” capsized in San Diego Bay and both Matthew and his daughter Mia drowned. Joanna hears that part of the story from Matthew’s ex, Mia’s mother. Our suspicions are aroused when Joanna acts so neurotically overprotective of Evie and Aaron that ultimately a police officer accosts them in a park and warns Joanna not to be physically abusive to Aaron. They’re also aroused when Joanna finds a gun box belonging to her mother (regrettably unidentified on imdb.com even though she’s the only truly sympathetic character in the story), and later mom finds the box emptied of its gun and the Taser she also carried. Joanna’s fears ramp up into overdrive when “Piper” offers to take Leo and the kids sailing during the upcoming three-day weekend, and she desperately pleads with Leo not to let that happen because of what Piper a.k.a. Pamela did the last time she took her husband and his kids out sailing.

Where I thought this was heading was towards a climax at sea, in which Joanna would rent a power boat, use it to track down Piper, Leo and the kids, and shoot Piper with the gun before Piper could kill Leo and the kids. Instead the final confrontation takes place on land, and Joanna’s gunshot wounds but does not kill Piper. Then there’s a commercial break, and with just five minutes of running time left to go [big-time spoiler alert!], we’re suddenly thrown a curveball. The next scene after the commercial break shows Joanna in a federal penitentiary (the intertitle doesn’t say which one, and Charles questioned this because even if Joanna had killed somebody, since murder is generally not a federal crime she’d most likely have been sent to state prison instead), and we learn that Joanna and Leo were never married; that Joanna was just a woman Leo hired as either a paralegal, a nanny, or both; and Joanna became so obsessed with the kids that she drowned their actual mother in a bathtub and moved herself into Leo’s house, posing as Leo’s wife and the children’s mother. I looked up the book The Wife Stalker on goodreads.com mainly to find out which writers to blame for that preposterous ending – the Constantines or Barbara Marshall – and it turned out that was how the book ended, too. There were quite a few changes between the book and movie: the book takes place in Westport, Connecticut; the male lead’s name is Leo Drakos; one of the kids is still named Evie but her sibling is Stelli; Piper joins the local yacht club as soon as she arrives in Westport (don’t most yacht clubs require you to have a sponsor who’s already a member?); and, judging from the heavily lipsticked model on the cover, the protagonists of the novel are white instead of Black. (I was amused that Leo Drake is presented as a graduate of Howard University, the historically Black college whose alumni included Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris.) But enough people on goodreads complained about the ending that it was clear Barbara Marshall had simply carried it over from the novel and it was the Constantines who were the culprits.

Loan Shark (Encore Pictures, Lippert Films, 1952)

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

Later on March 29, my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good movie on YouTube: Loan Shark, a 1952 “B” from Encore Pictures (as soon as I saw that credit I inevitably joked to Charles, “Haven’t we seen this before?”) released through Lippert and dealing with a loan-shark racket that victimizes the employees of the Delta Tire Company. (I was tempted to joke that Delta would be better off if they made their tires round rather than triangle-shaped, but there was enough “tire porn” in the movie it was clear that Delta tires, like everybody else’s, were round.) Directed by Seymour Friedman from a story by future producer Martin Rackin and a script by Rackin and Eugene Ling, Loan Shark stars George Raft as Joe Gargen, who’s just been released from prison after serving a nearly three-year prison sentence for assault. (He hit somebody in a bar fight and knocked him down, but though he only used his fists, since he’d once been a professional boxer his fists legally counted as “weapons.”) He shows up at the unnamed town where Delta has its headquarters to stay with his sister, Martha Haines (Helen Westcott). Only the workers at Delta are being victimized by a particularly nasty ring of crooks who first run an illegal casino where the Delta employees gamble away their money, then offer to loan them at typically outrageous rates of interest so high that the poor victims are continually paying interest and never get a chance to pay off the principal. What’s more, the gang has a bunch of thugs on retainer to beat up anyone who falls behind on their payments. Martha’s best friend, Ann Nelson (Dorothy Hart), is the secretary of the plant supervisor, Mr. Howell (George Eldredge), who’s trying to work with the union leader to break the loan-shark gang once and for all.

She offers to get Joe Gargen a job at Delta Tire, but Joe at first refuses when he finds that what the job really is is to infiltrate the loan-shark gang and thereby get the information they need to report them to the police. Then Martha’s husband Ed (William Phipps) is murdered by Charlie Thompson (Russell Johnson), who’s ostensibly just another Delta worker but is secretly part of the gang. His real job is to steer fellow Delta workers to the illegal casino and hook them up with the loan sharks. Charlie knocked off Ed because Ed was threatening to organize the Delta workers to fight back against the gang and resist them. Joe takes the job of busting the gang but insists on doing it his way with no interference either from Delta’s management or the union and no involvement of the police. Joe ultimately gets invited to join the gang by Vince Phillips (John Hoyt), its above-ground leader, but enforcer Lou Donelli (Paul Stewart, the butler from Citizen Kane) is suspicious of him. Joe rises quickly in the gang, especially after he opens a legitimate-seeming laundry, Embassy, as a front to reach out to bored housewives and ensnare them as casino and loan-shark customers. Of course Martha and Ann are thoroughly disgusted with Joe’s gang involvements, especially since Joe can’t explain to them why he’s doing it. In that regard Loan Shark resembles a 1930’s Warner Bros. gangster movie, including ones George Raft had previously made, in which the good guy has to pretend to be a crook to infiltrate a criminal organization but can’t tell those near and dear to him why he’s doing it. Joe is determined to remain in the gang long enough to suss out the mysterious “Mr. Big” who’s really in charge of it and making all the money, and to accomplish this he starts keeping his own set of books about Embassy Laundry detailing how much money they’re actually taking in, so even if they escape justice for the loan-sharking he can still report them to the Internal Revenue Service and get them busted as tax cheats. Alas, Joe “outs” himself by calling Howell from the Embassy office, unaware that Donelli has flipped on the office intercom so he can eavesdrop on Joe’s end of the call.

Joe gets waylaid outside the office by Phillips and Donelli, though he refuses to get in the same car as them and insists on taking a taxi to the secret headquarters of the real head of the organization, In a 1930’s movie, made during a far more anti-capitalist age, Delta CEO Mr. Howell would have turned out to be the “Big Boss,” but as of 1952 it is Walter Kerr (Larry Dobkin), whom we’d previously seen only as the gang’s seemingly milquetoast accountant. Ultimately there’s a big shoot-out in Walter’s home in which both he and Donelli are killed, and after they learn the real reason Joe had apparently sold out to the gang, Martha and Ann reconcile with him and there’s the expected clinch between Joe and Ann at the end. There’s also a rather odd credit for a song called “Peru,” composed by Victor Young with lyrics by Edward Heyman and with a melody strikingly reminiscent of the 1930’s song “September in the Rain,” but though it’s heard as an instrumental through much of the movie (including a relatively complete performance by a vaguely Latin band in a bar called, like the one in The Leech Woman, simply “Bar”), no one actually sings it – not even Margia Dean as “Ivy,” a waitress and (it’s hinted) B-girl at “Bar” and the illegal casino for which it’s a cover. Loan Shark is a pretty predictable movie – though that in itself was a relief after the hairpin turn Wife Stalker took in its last five minutes – but also a surprisingly well-made one, even though it would have been better if Raft had made it 15 years earlier and hadn’t been so obviously over the hill as he was here (he was 51 when he made Loan Shark and both he and Paul Stewart were obviously being stunt-doubled in their fight scenes). Incidentally, Charles and I both looked up Raft’s career on imdb.com after Loan Shark, and it turned out his real name was George Ranft (just one letter longer than his screen moniker), he lived until 1980, and his last film, made that year, was called The Man With Bogart’s Face. Given the bizarre connections between Raft’s and Bogart’s careers – Bogart got major boosts from making High Sierra (1940) and The Maltese Falcon (1941) after Raft turned them down, and Raft actively lobbied for the male lead in Casablanca (1942) only to be told by Jack Warner, “Forget it. After High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, Bogart’s a bigger star than you are now” – Raft must have felt haunted by Bogart’s memory even though Raft survived him by 23 years!

Three Bad Men (Fox Film Corporation, 1926)

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

Last night (March 26, 2025) my husband Charles and I watched Late Night with Stephen Colbert, which among other things featured Chris Hemsworth taking the “Colbert Questionert,” a list of 15 questions Colbert asks selected guests to make sure they can be well and truly “known” to him and his audiences. One of the questions was, “Favorite Action Movie” – and if I were asked that question my choice would be an unusual out-of-left-field one: John Ford's tragically neglected and unsung 1926 silent masterpiece, Three Bad Men. My husband Charles and I watched it on January 13, 2008 – four months before I launched this blog – and here’s what I had to say about it when I wrote my journal the next morning.

My partner Charles and I watched the third film in sequence from the Ford at Fox box — which turned out to be an unexpected masterpiece; Three Bad Men, a surprisingly dark Western set against the backdrop of the Dakota land rush in 1876 (a precursor to the one in Oklahoma 14 years later and triggered by the discovery of gold in the Dakota Hills, for which the Sioux Indians were forced off their lands and onto smaller and nastier reservations — a reality considerably whitewashed in this film’s expository titles — to make room for the whites). Three Bad Men was based on a novel called Over the Border by one Herman Whitaker, though it certainly has a family resemblance to Peter B. Kyne’s story “Three Godfathers” (which Ford had already filmed at Universal in 1919 as Marked Men and would remake for MGM in 1948 in color, with John Wayne in the lead). It was scripted by John Stone with titles by Ralph Spence and Malcolm Stuart Boylan — though the cornball humor and the references to actual old songs of the period are pure Ford (it’s intriguing that Ford was using old songs in his films even before sound came in and actually allowed him to make sure the audience could hear them) — and photographed by George Schneiderman, though this time the surviving print was scratchy and grainy and, though quite watchable, didn’t do justice to Schneiderman’s work the way the DVD’s of Just Pals and The Iron Horse had. Also, according to Ford biographer Tag Gallagher, the film was drastically cut during its initial release (from 118 to 92 minutes) and the shorter version is all that survives — one suspects the longer version would have made more of some of the contrasts, like the Southern background of leading lady Lee Carlton (Olive Borden), revealed when the canteen on her wagon is grey and has the crossed-swords Confederate logo and the initials “C.S.A.” on it, versus the Northern background of leading man Dan O’Malley (George O’Brien), who appears in most of his scenes in full Union uniform — but, like such other famously shorn films as Greed and The Magnificent Ambersons, what’s left of Three Bad Men is enough to establish its greatness.

Gallagher says it was a major box-office flop in 1926 — so much so that Ford, who in the preceding 12 years of his directorial career had made Westerns almost exclusively, didn’t make another Western at all for the next 13 years (until Stagecoach marked his return to the genre). What I suspect turned audiences off of this movie in 1926 is the very quality that today makes it seem far ahead of its time: its moral ambiguity. The titular three bad men are outlaws “Bull” Stanley (Tom Santschi, a second-tier Western star who lasted until the end of the silent era but mostly in independent “B”’s), Mike Costigan (J. Farrell MacDonald) and “Spade” Allen (Frank Campeau), and we know they’re bad because we see a montage of wanted posters for them in various jurisdictions (including Mexico!) and crimes (mostly bank robbery and horse stealing), but in the plot of the film they actually become heroes and (like the “bad” men in Three Godfathers) are redeemed at the end by sacrificing their lives for a good cause — here, to save the ingénue leads. The real villain is Layne Hunter (Lou Tellegen, a surprisingly cosmopolitan actor to turn up in a John Ford Western), the sheriff of the town of Custer, from which the land rush is supposed to start; though supposedly on the side of law and order, he actually has his own gang of criminals, whom he sends after the high-priced thoroughbred race horses in the Carlton wagon train. Hunter’s gang kills Lee Carlton’s father, but then the three “bad” men happen by because they were planning to steal the race horses themselves, only instead of doing so they drive off Hunter’s men and save Lee, with “Bull” insisting to his sidekicks that they leave Lee’s horses alone while he takes the girl under his personal protection. Lee and O’Malley had already met earlier in a rather annoying meet-cute in which she had got grease on her face from her wagon losing its wheel (his face looks like that of a normal human being, but hers is so heavily swathed in white makeup she looks like a mime), and intriguingly it is Lee who is the sexual aggressor between them, but through most of the film Lee is living with “Bull” and seems genuinely attracted to him, and it’s he who decides he isn’t worthy of her and so he sends his men into Custer to find her a suitable husband.

There’s one incredible scene in the town saloon in which Mike and “Spade” (whose body language when they sleep together does seem decidedly homoerotic) fasten onto a “dandy” type and practically cruise him — when they’re not opening his mouth and kicking his leg as they would do if they were buying a horse. Hunter is shown as such a no-goodnick he off-handedly tells his mistress Millie (Priscilla Bonner) to get lost (and there’s a mistaken-identity scene in which she sneaks up behind O’Malley, who’s joined “Bull”’s entourage, and attempts to seduce him while he has his eyes closed and responds because he thinks she’s Lee; it’s old hat but still funny) and devises a scheme to sneak across the border into land-rush territory the night before, grab a choice spot and drive off anyone who tries to claim that land legitimately. Three Bad Men contains a spectacular sequence of the land rush itself, comparing favorably to the depictions of the later Oklahoma land rush in William S. Hart’s Tumbleweeds (also released in 1926), Cimarron (1931) and The Oklahoma Kid (1939) and obviously meant as Fox’s attempt to attract audiences who’d loved The Iron Horse with more exciting mass action. It includes a great bit in which the editor of the Custer paper takes along a pressman and a press on a flatbed wagon so he can write dispatches from the land rush as it’s going on — which Ford insisted was based on a true story: “The newspaperman who rode along with his press — printing the news all through the event — that actually happened.” It also has a superbly staged fight scene in the Custer saloon and a heart-stoppingly beautiful shot introducing the title characters against either a rising or setting sun (we’re not sure which but, even in a less than pristine print, Schneiderman’s camerawork is absolutely gorgeous), but this is more than a simple story illustrated with pretty pictures.

The moral ambiguity and especially the strong attraction between Lee and “Bull” (anticipating one of Ford’s last films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance from 1962, in its love triangle between an innocent young woman, a bookish young man and a man of strength and power) make this an extraordinary movie for 1926, a precursor of the “psychological Westerns” that were all the rage in the early 1950’s and considered so innovative then. Three Bad Men also derives a lot of its richness from a favorite theme of Ford’s: the “civilization” of the West, the imposition of rules and mutual responsibilities on previously free-wheeling frontier communities, and the role of women in bringing that about (which makes me wonder, however good the 1931 Cimarron is as it stands, if it would have been even better if Ford had directed it; maybe he would have made Yancey Cravat’s wanderlust believable, a task that evaded Wesley Ruggles and his writers). There’s also a great scene in the middle of the land rush in which a pioneer family is stopped short of the gold country when their wagon breaks down, the husband paints a sign on their wagon reading, “Busted by God!,” the wife (it would be the woman!) picks up the soil and grinds it in her hands, and then solemnly tells her husband and us that the real gold in the Dakota country is in the fertility of its soil. In the end, the three bad men give their lives to save O’Malley and Lee from Hunter’s men and give them time to plant their homestead — and an epilogue reveals their farm, growing a bumper crop of wheat freely waving in the wind, and their home and child, whom they’ve named after the “bad” men who enabled them to survive long enough to settle, marry and give birth to him. Three Bad Men is a surprising masterpiece, its sentimentality held in sufficient check (as with Chaplin, Ford’s biggest weakness as an artist was his tendency towards the sentimental) that it can reach far deeper levels of emotion than the average film of its (or any, for that matter) time — and the fact that the “bad” men are its heroes and the representative of law and order its principal villain gives it a richness and moral complexity that may have put off 1926 audiences but makes the film seem modern now.