Some Like It Hot (Ashton Productions, The Mirisch Corporation, United Artists, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, September 26) my husband Charles and I watched what amounted to a Billy Wilder double feature on Turner Classic Movies even though that’s not really what the TCM programmers intended. The first film on our program was the 1959 drag comedy Some Like It Hot, which they were showing as the second half of a double feature that also included the original 1978 French version of La Cage aux Folles even though the movies have virtually nothing in common other than they both feature men dressed as women. Some Like It Hot actually began life in 1935 as a French film called Fanfare of Love about a pair of struggling male musicians who adopt various disguises to get jobs. They dress as Hungarians to get jobs in a Gypsy band; they do blackface to get jobs in a Black band; and they dress as women to get jobs in an all-woman band. Robert Thoeren, expatriate German director who in 1933 – just before the Nazis took power, which counts as one of the worst bits of timing in film history – had just made Viktor und Viktoria, about a woman who joins a troupe of female impersonators and has to pretend to be a man pretending to be a woman, wrote the script along with Michael Logan (who like Thoeren got writing credit on Some Like It Hot) along with Pierre Prévert and René Pulpi (who didn’t). In 1958 Billy Wilder had the idea to do a remake but eliminate all the other disguises to focus on the leads playing two men who have to dress and pose as women. Wilder’s original casting for the film was Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as the cross-dressing male leads and Mitzi Gaynor as Sugar Kane, the band’s ukulele player and singer whom they both fall for. But when Wilder made that proposal to United Artists, they turned his cast down because none of the suggested leads had enough star power to carry a film. The UA “suits” said they’d finance the film if Wilder could get a more important male – Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis – for one of the leads. Wilder actually made an appointment with Sinatra to discuss the role, but Sinatra never showed up. (When La Cage aux Folles was remade in the U.S. in 1996 as The Birdcage, Sinatra was once again offered the male lead and flaked out of the meeting to discuss it.) Then Wilder got a call from Arthur Miller, the prestigious playwright who was then married to Marilyn Monroe. Miller told Wilder that Monroe had just suffered a miscarriage and needed a job immediately to get her mind off the tragedy of losing her baby. (Monroe would get pregnant again during Some Like It Hot and would once again have a miscarriage; later Monroe biographers have guessed that she couldn’t bring a pregnancy to term because she’d had too many illegal abortions during her starlet days and they’d torn up her insides.) Wilder suggested Some Like It Hot even though he’d already had a hard time working with Marilyn on their previous film together, The Seven-Year Itch (1955). Marilyn ran with it and so did the “suits” at United Artists, who told Wilder that she was such a big star that if he could get her to play Sugar Kane he could cast the two men with whomever he wanted.

Wilder and his screenwriting colleague, Isidor “I.A.L.” Diamond (the initials stood for “Interscholastic Algebra League,” in which Diamond had been a champion during his high-school days), at first were going to set Some Like It Hot in contemporary times but then decided to make it a period piece because with an old-time setting all the clothes would look a bit “off” to modern audiences. Wilder and Diamond brainstormed when they should have the film take place and finally decided on 1929 because they wanted the male leads to be in such imminent peril for their lives that they wouldn’t dare doff their drags even when they were both attracted to the woman. As Wilder explained to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse (1969), “A lot of people wondered why we used the St. Valentine’s Day massacre to start the picture. But we had to have something really powerful to force the boys to pretend to be girls, and to make it rational that, even if they were in love with Marilyn, they wouldn’t take off their clothes and say, ‘Look, I’m a man!’ So the fact that they’re threatened with machine guns supplied the reason.” The gimmick is that bassist Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and Joe (Tony Curtis) happen upon the St. Valentine’s Day massacre while in a garage to pick up a car belonging to Dolores (Beverly Wills), their agent’s secretary, to drive to a gig in Urbana. They watch gangster Spats Columbo (George Raft) and his hit people (including the great Mike Mazurki from the cast of Murder, My Sweet) rub out the rival gang of “Toothpick” Charlie (George E. Stone), only they’re noticed by the gang and flee for their lives, though not before the gangsters’ bullets carve four telltale holes in the front of Jerry’s bass. (Ironically, when the film Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967, many critics questioned the rapid alternation between violence and slapstick comedy. Actually Buster Keaton had done that in his 1926 masterpiece The General, but I’ve often wondered why the critics who didn’t like Bonnie and Clyde had seemingly forgot about Some Like It Hot, which had mixed comedy and violence just eight years earlier.) They plead with their agent, Sig Poliakoff (Billy Gray), for a job, preferably out of town, but the only gig available for a saxophonist and a bass player is with “Sweet Sue (Joan Shawlee) and Her Society Syncopators.” The drag musicians – Joe calling himself “Josephine” and Jerry using the name “Daphne” after he rejects “Geraldine” – join the train carrying Sweet Sue and her band to the Seminole-Ritz Hotel in Florida, “played” by the real-life Hotel del Coronado off the coast of San Diego. (A number of imdb.com commentators have noted that the shadows in the movie are falling in the wrong direction for an East Coast location.)

Along the way they meet Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), whose real name is “Sugar Kowalczyk,” and claim to be graduates of the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music. (I once watched Some Like It Hot with my late partner John Gabrish, who’d grown up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and he assured me that no such institution existed.) Sugar announces that she’s hoping to land a millionaire sugar daddy in Florida, and obligingly Joe a.k.a. Josephine disguises himself as the heir to the Shell Oil fortune (an anachronism since there were no Shell gas stations in the U.S. until 1932) and, speaking with the voice of Cary Grant (whose first feature film, This Is the Night, was not made until 1932), invites Sugar to “his” yacht for an evening dinner and … The yacht is actually the property of Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), who’s fallen hard for Daphne and takes him on a date that includes dinner and dancing to a Cuban band. When “Daphne” and “Josephine” get together, Daphne announces that Osgood has proposed to him and he’s seriously considering his offer. “Why would a guy want to marry a guy?” asks “Josephine,” to which the besotted Daphne answers, “Security!” (Joe E. Brown has an unusual connection with Marilyn Monroe. Born Norma Jeane Baker, Monroe got her screen name from Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox talent scout who signed her to a studio contract in 1946. Lyon had been an actor who’d appeared with Ziegfeld stage star Marilyn Miller in the 1931 film Her Majesty, Love, and got the idea of calling Norma Jeane “Marilyn” from Marilyn Miller. Joe E. Brown had been in Marilyn Miller’s first film, the 1929 musical Sunny, and to my knowledge is the only performer who worked with both Marilyn Miller and Marilyn Monroe.) All seems to be going acceptably until Spats Columbo shows up to attend a gangsters’ convention under the cover identity “Friends of Italian Opera.” (According to Ovid Demaris, who wrote a number of true-crime books about the Mafia, this was inspired by a real-life speakeasy in Chicago in the 1920’s in which the waiters took turns singing operatic arias; Billy Wilder knew about this and decided to insert an in-joke by using “Friends of Italian Opera” as the front for his meeting of Mafiosi.)

Among the attendees is Johnny Paradise (Edward G. Robinson, Jr.), who’s ostensibly a member of Spats’s gang – he’s even shown flipping a coin the way George Raft did in his star-making role in the 1932 Scarface, and when Raft sees him do it he snarls, “Where’d ya learn that cheap trick?” – but really is the hit man hired by the head of the “Friends of Italian Opera,” “Little Bonaparte” (Nehemiah Persoff), to rub out Spats Columbo as revenge for Spats having killed “Toothpick” Charlie. Once again “Josephine” and “Daphne” are fleeing for their lives, with the four holes in “Daphne”’s bass giving them away as the two musicians who’ve now witnessed two major mob hits, though a federal agent (Pat O’Brien) is on hand to arrest the gangsters behind the hit on Spats. Our Heroes/Heroines find themselves fleeing in Osgood’s boat with Osgood and Sugar. Sugar pairs off with Joe even after she learns that he’s not only broke but also a saxophone player (she’s had bad experiences with saxophonists before), while in an audacious scene that still packs a punch even now, “Daphne” pleads with Osgood that they can’t get married. “Well, in the first place, I'm not a natural blonde,” “Daphne” protests. “Doesn't matter,” Osgood says. “I smoke! I smoke all the time!” “Daphne” says (a gag reference to a previous line in which Osgood had told “her” that his mother had objected to him marrying a woman who smoked). “I don't care,” Osgood says. “Well, I have a terrible past,” “Daphne” says. “For three years now, I've been living with a saxophone player.” “I forgive you,” Osgood replies. Then “Daphne” says, tragically, “I can never have children!” Osgood says, “We can adopt some.” Then “Daphne” pulls off his wig and says, “But you don't understand, Osgood! Ohh,” reverting to his normal Jerry voice, “I'm a man!” Osgood shrugs and says, “Well, nobody's perfect!” There are varying accounts as to how that line ended up in the movie, with Wilder insisting that it was all Diamond’s idea. There’s one account that it was just a place-holder until they could come up with something better, but they never did. When Wilder was facing death himself, he insisted that his tombstone read, “I was a writer, but nobody’s perfect.”

Wilder’s difficulties with Marilyn Monroe have become legendary; she often showed up late on set, and during the studio work in Hollywood she would get so blocked that she would blow take after take on such simple lines as, “It’s me, Sugar,” or, “Where’s that bourbon?” Later, during the location work on Coronado, Marilyn would astonish Wilder by being line-perfect through whole pages of script. I’ve long suspected that Monroe was so traumatized by having grown up in L.A. and been surrounded by the film world (her mother was a negative cutter at MGM, a job that had no creative aspect but required highly precise work lest a mistake ruin a key scene and force an expensive retake) that she was simply that much more comfortable out of town. Wilder told an interviewer shortly after he finished Some Like It Hot, “It took me six months before I could look at my wife again and not hate her for being a woman,” though in 1969 he was a good deal more understanding when he talked about the film to Higham and Greenberg. “Marilyn Monroe was very sensitive, difficult, and disorganized,” Wilder said a decade after he made the film and seven years after Monroe’s still-mysterious death. “She tried hard, but she couldn’t help herself. In some cases you had to match shots from different takes to make it seem like she was giving a performance; but there were stretches when she was absolutely phenomenal: one of the great comediennes. Once she started rolling, and that tiny kind of an inhibition disappeared, she was wonderful, as good as anyone. The metabolism had to be right with her; and if it was right, she was a marvelous thing to direct; but I was utterly dependent on her moods.”

Ace in the Hole, a.k.a. The Big Carnival (Paramount, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, September 26) my husband Charles and I followed up Some Like It Hot with a quite different Billy Wilder film on Turner Classic Movies: Ace in the Hole, a 1951 masterpiece about the media and how people are manipulated by unscrupulous figures who frame their coverage of real events to move them emotionally. Ace in the Hole was Wilder’s first film after Sunset Boulevard (1950) and his first since breaking up his long-standing collaboration with producer Charles Brackett. He was riding high at his studio, Paramount, and after the sensational success of Sunset Boulevard he was able to get just about anything he wanted green-lighted. What he wanted to do was the story of a burned-out reporter named Charles “Chuck” Tatum (Kirk Douglas) who’s been fired by 11 different publishers and is now forced to work for the Albuquerque Star-Dispatch under editor Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall). Boot has a woven sampler framed on his wall with the words “TELL THE TRUTH,” which Tatum seems to regard as an insult. A year into his sentence at the Star-Dispatch, Tatum stumbles on a story which he figures can create a sensation that will be a springboard to restore him to the world of big-city journalism. A man named Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) has got trapped in a cave-in as he was exploring for Native American relics he could sell in his curio shop and trading post. Tatum immediately sees the story potential in Leo’s predicament, but only if it can be stretched out long enough to stay on the nation’s front pages for at least a week, especially after he hears that the local Natives have nicknamed the cave “The Curse of the Seven Vultures” and said there’s a curse on it that will kill anyone who removes artifacts from it: an easy and obvious “news hook” Tatum exploits to the hilt. Wilder and his co-writers, Walter Newman (who came up with the original idea under the title The Human-Interest Story) and Lesser Samuels (who joined the writing team because he’d worked on newspapers himself), have Tatum make common cause with the local sheriff, Gus Kretzer (Ray Teal), even though his nominal boss Boot is convinced that the sheriff is corrupt and the Star-Dispatch should be exposing him instead of cozying up to him. A local contractor named Sam Smollett (Frank Jaquet), who got the job through the sheriff’s influence, insists he can rescue Leo by shoring up the cave walls and he can do that in 16 hours. But that isn’t long enough for Tatum: instead he suggests that Smollett bring in a drill and bore a hole through the top of the mountain to rescue Leo from above, even though that will take a week.

Tatum’s copy gets picked up nationwide and leads to a sudden influx of people to visit the site and wait out Leo’s ordeal. This is a boon for Leo’s dissatisfied wife, Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling, who turns in a first-rate performance as a hard-bitten woman that should have made her an overnight star if Ace in the Hole had had the box-office success it deserved), who suddenly is doing huge amounts of business at Leo’s combination diner, gas station, and curio store. The influx of cash just reinforces her dream of leaving Leo, whom she married exactly five years earlier (their anniversary is a key plot point in the movie) only to find herself stuck in the middle of nowhere miles away from the wild life she craves. As Leo’s ordeal continues and his medical condition deteriorates despite the doctor (Harry Harvey) on scene, who’s sending him painkillers with which he can inject himself, so does his will to live, especially since the ceaseless pounding of the drill above him is keeping him from falling asleep. Meanwhile, a carnival has set up outside Leo’s cave and a country-music artist has written a song called “We’re Coming, Leo” and is performing on a makeshift stage while selling sheet-music copies of it to the captive audience. In one of Wilder’s cleverer in-jokes, the first outside person to show up at Leo’s ordeal is Al Federber (Frank Cady), an insurance salesman with the Pacific All-Risk company: the same outfit Fred MacMurray’s character worked for in Wilder’s 1944 classic film noir Double Indemnity. (Porter Hall, who plays the idealistic publisher Boot in Ace in the Hole, was in Double Indemnity too, as the fellow passenger on the train who briefly threatens to expose the murder plot involving MacMurray’s and Barbara Stanwyck’s characters.) Tatum tells his photographer and sidekick Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) midway through the story that they’re turning in their notices to the Star-Dispatch and offering their future copy to whichever big-city newspaper makes them the highest-paid bid, and the winner is Tatum’s former boss in New York, Nagel (Richard Gaines). Only Tatum’s finely honed plan goes awry when Leo announces that he literally has only hours to live, and if they don’t get him out of the cave soon he’s a-goner. Leo even pleads with Tatum to bring him a priest to administer the last rites.

Realizing that the great human-interest story he’s been pushing on the world won’t be worth a hill of beans if he can’t provide it a happy ending, Tatum asks contractor Smollett if they can get Leo out through the original plan of shoring up the cave walls – only Smollett tells Tatum that shoring won’t work anymore because the drilling has so weakened the cave walls that any attempt to enter the cave with the beams needed to shore it will risk a cave-in that will kill the crew. Meanwhile Lorraine, who’s been hoping she could seduce Tatum into taking her to New York with him, gets so angry that, after he nearly chokes her with a raggedy stole Leo had bought her as a wedding present, she stabs him in self-defense with a pair of scissors. Tatum learns that Leo has died with the drill just 10 feet away from him, and announces it to the crowd. Nagel, his once and future boss in New York, fires him again after the other papers scoop him on the news that Leo died, and Tatum collapses and dies himself on the floor of the Star-Dispatch newsroom. Ace in the Hole was a major hit in Europe and a major flop in the U.S., and Billy Wilder blamed himself for having pushed his cynicism too far for American audiences. While it had a real-life inspiration – the case of Kentucky coal-miner Floyd Collins, who in 1925 spent 2 ½ weeks trapped inside a mine before he, like Leo Minosa, finally died – Wilder told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in 1969 for their book The Celluloid Muse, “My mistake was in coaxing the American public into the theatre with the idea that they were going to get a cocktail, whereas instead they got a shot of vinegar.” He also said that he’d got the idea of a carnival outside from the real Floyd Collins case: “People criticized me for bad taste, but it all really happened. The audience, unfortunately, doesn’t want to see reality. Maybe I was wrong; maybe I should have tried to get them out of the rut instead of showing it to them on the screen.” As a result, Wilder decided to make mostly comedies for the rest of his career, apparently figuring that he could get audiences to accept his cynical view of the world but only if he leavened it with humor.

During the initial run of the film Paramount executive Y. Frank Freeman ordered its title changed from Ace in the Hole to The Big Carnival – which was the title it had when I first saw it on commercial TV in the early 1970’s and was blown away by it, regarding it as Wilder’s masterpiece. (Supposedly Wilder was so angry with Freeman that he began making jokes about the man’s name – “Why Frank Freeman?” – though elsewhere I’ve heard that joke attributed to two of Paramount’s biggest stars, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Once, the story goes, Hope said to Crosby, “I wish I knew the answer.” Crosby said, “What’s the question?,” and Hope answered, “Y. Frank Freeman?”) Ace in the Hole is also an example of the unfortunate course of Kirk Douglas’s career; in his early films (not only this one but The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Out of the Past, I Walk Alone, and Detective Story) he often played villains and he was quite good at it, but later on he became such a big star he could only be cast as heroes. While Ace in the Hole was far from the first film to depict journalists as amoral assholes interested only in “getting the story” no matter how many people they hurt in the process – Charlie Chaplin’s very first film, Making a Living (1914), had that sort of plot line – it’s a magnificent movie that could easily be remade today and might even be a hit in today’s market, given that Americans are losing faith in all their major institutions, including the media.

Gay Purr-ee (United Producers of America, Warner Bros., 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, September 23) I bypassed Jeopardy! and instead put on Turner Classic Movies to watch an all-time favorite film of mine, Gay Purr-ee (1962). This was an animated feature-length film made by United Producers of America (UPA) in association with Warner Bros., which co-produced and distributed the film. UPA had been founded in 1941 by refugees from the Walt Disney Studios, who had lost their jobs there as fallout from the bitter animators’ strike that broke up the team that had made Disney’s first animated features (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo, Fantasia) and transformed Disney from a relatively apolitical man to a major funder and supporter of the American Right. Walt Disney would derisively refer to UPA’s staff as “those Commies down the river,” and indeed many of the UPA animators, including John Hubley, were decidedly Left in their political orientations. (Hubley did some stunning set designs for the 1951 film noir The Prowler, but he was blacklisted and denied the credit he deserved. Later The Prowler’s director, Joseph Losey, was also blacklisted and spent the rest of his career in Britain.) UPA also departed from Disney’s example in pursuing so-called “limited animation,” in which fewer drawings were used to create the illusion of motion. While Disney and their principal competitors in the animation business, Warner Bros. and MGM, stuck to “full animation” (using one drawing per frame of finished film), “limited animation” used the same drawing for two or three frames, creating a much jerkier style of movement. The great advantage of limited animation was it was much cheaper; it also lent itself to a more stylized type of cartoon. UPA created classic characters like Mr. Magoo (an irascible little man whose main characteristic was extreme nearsightedness) and Gerald McBoing-Boing (a boy who “spoke” with the sound of a Jew’s harp).

In 1962 they decided to branch out into features and produced Gay Purr-ee, a rather awkwardly titled love story about cats in turn-of-the-last-century Paris. One innovation of UPA’s on Gay Purr-ee was to use voice actors who were celebrities in their own rights instead of the anonymous drones who’d voiced previous cartoons. The central character in Gay Purr-ee, a blandly designed white female farm cat named Mewsette, was voiced by Judy Garland, while her boyfriend, an orange cat named Jaune-Tom who’s a champion mouse-catcher, was voiced by Robert Goulet. Fortunately, in addition to the major stars (along with Red Buttons as Jaune-Tom’s comic-relief sidekick Robespierre), UPA used veteran voice actor Paul Frees (who among other assignments dubbed for Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune in Grand Prix and Tora, Tora, Tora, films that required Mifune to speak English, which he couldn’t do) as the principal villain, Meowrice Percy Beaucoup. The other big gimmick in Gay Purr-ee was that the settings and backgrounds were largely (though not consistently) designed in the artistic styles of turn-of-the-last-century Paris, particularly Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism and whatever you call Vincent Van Gogh’s almost bas-relief style. There’s a great sequence in which Meowrice is describing the various portraits of Mewsette he’s commissioned the leading artists of Paris, including Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Pierre Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso, to make of her. (Actually there are some glitches in the chronology here; Van Gogh died in 1890 while Picasso didn’t evolve his Cubist style until 1909. But who cares?)

Basically Gay Purr-ee is a knock-off of Gigi, with at least one cast member (Hermione Gingold) in common, playing a similar role: an elderly woman (or feline) who trains the heroine in the social graces to make her a fitting companion for a male. When the film opens Mewsette is bored with her life in the farm region of Provence and decides, on the basis of a conversation she overhears between two human characters singing the praises of Paris, to run away there. She stows away in the humans’ carriage and Jaune-Tom, hearing she’s run off, determines to chase after her even though he has no way to get to Paris except by foot. On the way there’s a quite exciting thrill-comedy sequence as Jaune-Tom and Robespierre hide under a bridge to avoid getting run over by an oncoming train, only the bridge is over a ravine and it’s touch and go for a while whether Our Hero Cats will survive. Once Mewsette arrives in Paris she falls for a scoundrel, Meowrice Percy Beaucoup, who turns her over to his “sister,” Madame Rubens-Chatte (Hermione Gingold), for training to be a suitable mail-order bride for a Mr. Henry Phtt of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Of course Mewsette has no idea what dire fate Meowrice has in store for her. When Jaune-Tom and Robespierre show up in Paris they stumble on Madame Rubens-Chatte’s establishment and knock on the door, but before they get an answer they’re abducted by Meowrice’s henchcats, the Money-Cats (Bill Cole, Bill Lee, Thurl Ravenscroft, Max Smith) and sold into slavery as ship cats on a vessel bound for Alaska to participate in the Klondike Gold Rush. Fortunately the (human) captain of the ship befriends them, and the three of them go out prospecting. Thinking he’s only hunting down another mouse, Jaune-Tom discovers a large cache of gold nuggets and the trio return to Paris, as one of the headlines says in the montage, “trés loaded.” Meanwhile Meowrice has paid off Madame Rubens-Chatte for her services with Mewsette, only he wrote her a check and used disappearing ink.

Irate at having been swindled, she thunders, “If I had the opportunity to do him a disservice … ,” and said opportunity arises in the persons (or cats) of Jaune-Tom and Robespierre, who ask Madame Rubens-Chatte for Meowrice’s address and get it. Unfortunately, by the time they arrive Mewsette has scrawled a note on the floor stating she’s been taken to a train, and there’s an exciting climax on board the train in which Jaune-Tom and Robespierre ultimately overpower Meowrice, pack him into the box for Mr. Henry Phtt, and rescue Mewsette. I first ran across Gay Purr-ee in the late 1960’s on the old NBC-TV Saturday Night at the Movies program, which like a lot of TV showings of films then had an annoying habit of lopping off the opening credits and either not showing them to the end of the movie or not showing them at all. So I had no idea what the film was or what it was titled; it was just a charming animated story with the voices of Judy Garland and Robert Goulet clearly recognizable on the soundtrack. What’s more, I was watching it on an old black-and-white TV, thereby denying myself one of the key points of appeal for this film – its dazzling color design. The aspect of the film that got to me then still gets to me now: the riveting contrast between the namby-pamby design of the character of Mewsette and the throbbing intensity of the 40-something Judy Garland at the peak of her later powers. This was the Judy of the Carnegie Hall live double album recorded April 23, 1961 and the subsequent unfinished attempt at a follow-up at the Manhattan Music Center on April 25, 1962 (the idea was that Judy would do a full album of songs from Broadway musicals, though her voice went after just nine songs; I have this on a bootleg LP and it was finally released officially in 1989): occasionally ragged vocally but still throbbing with emotion.

At Judy’s insistence, the producers hired Harold Arlen to write the music for the film’s songs with E. Y. “Yip” Harburg providing the lyrics. Arlen and Harburg had collaborated on Judy’s (and everybody else’s) songs for her star-making movie, The Wizard of Oz, 23 years earlier, though in the meantime Harburg had been blacklisted for his Left-wing politics (which is how Ira Gershwin ended up writing the lyrics to Arlen’s songs for the 1954 film A Star Is Born). It was a great return for Harburg, who filled Judy’s numbers in particular with marvelous bits of wordplay like the lament in “Paris Is a Lonely Town”: “The chestnut, the willow/The colors of Utrillo/Turn to grey, grey hues” (though the Genius Web site garbles the next line badly: it’s really “The band playing Bizet/Along the Champs-Élysées” but the site has “The band playing vyse,” whatever that’s supposed to mean). He also wrote a surprisingly good vocal feature for Paul Frees, “The Horse Won’t Talk,” and a great ensemble number for the Money-Cats. I’m not as fond of Gay Purr-ee as I used to be, but it’s still a quite charming movie even though in some respects it’s dated badly (while in other respects, notably Judy Garland’s ferociously emotional singing, it hasn’t dated at all!) and Newsweek magazine, reviewing it when it was new, said, “The visual style is Van Gogh out of Magoo. There are songs with lines like ‘The chestnut, the willow/The colors of Utrillo,” voiced with varying competence by Judy Garland and Robert Goulet. There seems to be an effort to reach a hitherto undiscovered audience: the fey four-year-old with recherché taste.” Incidentally TCM showed this as part of an all-night tribute to animation director Chuck Jones, who with his wife Dorothy wrote the script while longtime UPA hand Abe Levitow directed. Unfortunately, though Warner Bros. distributed and co-produced the film, the “suits” at Warners had a huge hissy-fit when they learned their contractee Chuck Jones had been involved with it. They fired not only Jones himself but his entire unit, which moved en masse to MGM.

Fear and Desire (Kubrick Family, Joseph Burstyn Enterprises, 1952, released 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 20) my husband Charles and I screened a new Blu-Ray disc containing Stanley Kubrick’s first feature film, Fear and Desire (1952), as well as three short films: Flying Padre and Day of the Fight (both 1951) released by RKO-Pathé; and The Seafarers (1953), made as a promotional film for the Seafarers’ International Union (SIU). Fear and Desire was produced by Kubrick’s relatives, particularly a rich uncle, pharmacist Martin Perveler, who put up most of the money. Contrary to the impression you might get from the title, which would seem to indicate a Gothic romance with admixtures of horror, it’s actually a war movie, a genre to which Kubrick would return to again and again: Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Barry Lyndon (1975), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). There’s a fascinating quote on Kubrick’s Wikipedia page in which he attempted to explain why he was so fascinated with war stories: “The criminal and the soldier at least have the virtue of being against something or for something in a world where many people have learned to accept a kind of grey nothingness, to strike an unreal series of poses in order to be considered normal. … It's difficult to say who is engaged in the greater conspiracy – the criminal, the soldier, or us.” Kubrick literally disowned Fear and Desire in later years, attempting to destroy all surviving prints and telling interviewers when the film was thought lost that it wasn’t really that bothersome because it had been a terrible movie. (Alfred Hitchcock said the same thing about his one totally lost film, 1926’s The Mountain Eagle.) When the Telluride Film Festival turned up a print, courtesy of the George Eastman House (Kubrick had had Eastman Kodak do his processing and they routinely made a safety copy of every film they worked on), and showed it in 1993, while Kubrick was still alive, he made his displeasure clear and tried to block the screening. Actually Fear and Desire is quite an estimable work, holding a similar place in Kubrick’s canon as the not-quite-finished Too Much Johnson (1938), also shot in upstate New York, does to Orson Welles’s.

Fear and Desire also was an early example of Kubrick’s notorious penchant for re-editing and trimming his films even after they were already being shown in theatres. The original director’s cut shown at the 1952 Venice Film Festival was 71 minutes, but it was trimmed in release to 62 minutes, largely by cutting some of the philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) ramblings writer Howard Sackler (a former high-school classmate of Kubrick’s) inserted into the script. The opening narration (another frequent Kubrick trademark: he used scene-setting narration in The Killing and Dr. Strangelove and planned to in 2001: A Space Odyssey as well, though at the last minute he junked the narration in 2001 and thereby made the film deeper and richer for being more ambiguous) is typical: “There is war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, or one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist, unless we call them into being. This forest, then, and all that happens now is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear, and doubt, and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind.” Fear and Desire opens in a forest in which four servicemembers, Lt. Corby (Kenneth Harp), Mac (Frank Silvera, who would also appear in Kubrick’s second feature, Killer’s Kiss), Sidney (Paul Mazursky, who would later become a major film director in his own right), and Fletcher (Stephen Colt), regroup after their plane has crashed. They realize they are behind enemy lines and hatch a plan to get themselves back to their comrades by building a raft and using it to travel down a river. Along the way they spy a farmhouse which is housing enemy soldiers, whom in an explosive action scene they kill en masse and steal their food (an unappetizing-looking stew) and guns. Later they run into three young women who are fishing the river. They take one of them (Virginia Leith) prisoner and tie her to a tree, leaving Sidney behind to guard her while the other three try to return to the raft and see if it’s still there. Alas, Sidney gets the hots for her and loosens her bonds so he can rape her. Instead she uses the opportunity to try to flee, and Sidney shoots her dead rather than let her escape and risk her reporting them to the enemy. (Virginia Leith got a rave review from columnist Walter Winchell for her brief role in Fear and Desire, which helped earn her a 20th Century-Fox contract; alas, after a few minor roles in good films like Black Widow and Violent Saturday, they dropped her and within a decade Leith was reduced to dreck like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.)

Mac finds the body of the dead girl and the insane Sidney, and the two of them set forth on the raft while Lt. Corby and Fletcher go back to the farmhouse intent on killing the enemy general who is stationed there. Mac distracts the enemy’s guards by shooting at them from the raft, and Corby and Fletcher kill the general and escape by stealing an enemy plane and using it to fly back to their own side. (The plane is the single biggest non sequitur in the movie; it’s an ordinary commercial general-aviation aircraft of a type no actually existing military would have been using in the early 1950’s.) Corby and Fletcher eventually reunite with the mortally wounded Mac and the crazy Sidney back at their side’s base camp as the film suddenly and abruptly ends. Fear and Desire was not only directed by Kubrick but photographed and edited by him, too, and it’s pretty obvious he used a high-contrast film stock (probably Kodak’s Tri-X) to add to the sense of documentary-like realism. Kubrick came to this film through an odd career path: during World War II he had worked as a still photographer for Stars and Stripes, the servicemembers’ magazine officially published by the U.S. Army. After the war he’d parlayed that experience into a job for Look, Life’s chief competitor, and then he started dabbling into film. In 1951 Kubrick shot two documentary shorts and later sold them to RKO-Pathé, the 10-minute Flying Padre (about a real-life priest, Fred Stadtmueller, who worked a parish in rural New Mexico and bought a plane so he could fly in and out of remote locations; the film’s climax comes when he flies a seriously ill young boy and his mother to a hospital so his life can be saved) and the 20-minute Day of the Fight (about aspiring middleweight boxer Walter Cartier; his twin brother and manager, Vincent Cartier; and his opponent, African-American boxer Bobby James). RKO released Flying Padre under the “Screenliner” label and Day of the Fight as part of a series called This Is America! Our Blu-Ray copy of Fear and Desire included as bonus items not only the two shorts Kubrick sold to RKO but a third one, The Seafarers, a 30-minute promotional film for the Seafarers International Union (SIU) which he made a year after Fear and Desire. The Seafarers was a surprise in that it was filmed in color – Kubrick didn’t use color again until Spartacus (1960), a big-budget Hollywood spectacular he took over after producer-star Kirk Douglas fired the original director, Anthony Mann. “I didn’t know Kubrick made a FitzPatrick travelogue!” Charles joked when we first noticed that The Seafarers was in color.

Naturally I looked up the Seafarers International Union online this morning to make sure it still existed (it does, thank goodness), though of the three Kubrick shorts on this disc Day of the Fight is easily the best. In fact, it makes me wish that Kubrick had made a movie about boxing (as his Fear and Desire actor Paul Mazursky did with The Great White Hope). The film’s narration stresses the long odds against anyone who pursues prizefighting as a professional career; it states that as of 1951 there were 6,000 would-be boxers in the U.S. but only 600 made enough money to make their livings from it. Cartier is presented here as a legitimate contender for a world’s championship, a status he never achieved partly because of a controversial fight against champion Randy Turpin in 1953, two years after this film was made. According to Cartier’s Wikipedia page, “Fought on March 17, 1953 at Kensington's Earl's Court Express in England, it ended with Cartier being disqualified for holding in round two. With the bout over, Cartier went after Turpin and his twin brother Vincent attacked the fight's referee. As a result, Cartier was fined 1,000 British pounds.” Cartier made an opportune career switch to acting, appearing in films and TV shows like the movie Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), which starred Paul Newman as champion boxer Rocky Graziano (the film had originally been intended for James Dean but, like The Left-Handed Gun, was recast with Newman after Dean’s death) and the first two seasons of The Phil Silvers Show. Also the Cartier family’s original name was McCarthy, but his grandfather had feared he and his kin would face anti-Irish discrimination, so he changed it first to “Carter” and then “Cartier.” I was amused that the narrator of Day of the Fight, Douglas Edwards, pronounced “Cartier” in the French style, “Car-Tee-Yay,” while the announcer at his fight called him “Cart-Yer.” The film also features a brief appearance by boxing journalist Nat Fleischer, whose Nat Fleischer’s Ring Book is considered the definitive history of the sport.

Overall the Kino Lorber disc of Fear and Desire and the three Kubrick shorts is a stimulating look at this great and endlessly fascinating director’s early career, and it’s a good thing Fear and Desire escaped its creator’s attempts to obliterate it. Kubrick called it “a pretentious, inept and boring film – a youthful mistake costing about $50,000 – but it was distributed by Joseph Burstyn in the art houses and caused a little ripple of publicity and attention. … I mean, there were people around who found some good things in it, and on the strength of that I was able to raise private financing to make a second feature-length film [Killer's Kiss, (1955)]. And that was a silly story, too, but my concern was still in getting experience and simply functioning in the medium, so the content of a story seemed secondary to me. I just took the line of least resistance, whatever story came to hand. And for another thing I had no money to live on at the time, much less to buy good story material with – nor did I have the time to work it into shape – and I didn't want to take a job, and get off the track, so I had to keep moving.” But both Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss seem to me to be quite estimable movies, flawed from their low-budget limitations but still showcasing a director of promise, and as I noted in my blog post on Kubrick’s third (and first fully professional) film, The Killing (1956), “The Killing is a quite accomplished film, though to my mind Kubrick’s second film, Killer’s Kiss (also a film noir) is even more dreamlike and hallucinatory.”

A Day's Pleasure (Charles Chaplin Productions, First National Pictures, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 20) Turner Classic Movies showed a rather odd-seeming grab bag of films on their “Silent Sunday Nights” feature: A Flirt’s Mistake and The Rounders (both 1914), Character Studies (1923), and The Movies (1925). It turned out that what linked these movies together was the involvement of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (1887-1933), the second most popular male silent-era comedian (next to Charlie Chaplin) until his career was wiped out overnight when he hosted a “wild” party in San Francisco on September 5, 1921. Among the guests were starlet Virginia Rappé, who was found seriously ill when the party broke up and died of a ruptured bladder four days later. Arbuckle was arrested and tried for Rappé’s murder – though modern researchers generally agree that Rappé’s death was accidental, the result of an infection she got from a botched illegal abortion. Arbuckle went through three trials and his legal plight was such a boon to the news business that William Randolph Hearst once said coverage of Arbuckle’s case had sold more papers than anything since the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.) He was ultimately acquitted, but the film industry blacklisted him and forced him to keep himself alive as a director under the pseudonym “Will B. Goodrich.” (When the news of who that was finally came out, the joke around Hollywood was it was an Arbuckle pun on “will be good and rich,” though the name actually came from Arbuckle’s father, William Goodrich Arbuckle.) Arbuckle finally got a shot at a comeback when Warner Bros. signed him to make six sound shorts in 1933, and they did well enough they promised him a shot at a feature film, only he died of a heart attack at age 46 before that could happen. The TCM program on Arbuckle included two films he made at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios and two in his “Will B. Goodrich” directorial days. One of the Keystone films was The Rounders, a minor masterpiece in which Arbuckle and Chaplin co-starred; I remember seeing this as part of a five-film Chaplin at Keystone collection which proved how much better Chaplin’s movies got once he was permitted to write and direct them himself. The Rounders seemed to me the prototype of all the Laurel and Hardy movies, and it’s worth remembering that before either of them had made a movie Stan Laurel had understudied Chaplin in Fred Karno’s music-hall troupe and Chaplin based The Rounders on a skit he’d done for Karno.

Because Charles and I were busy watching the Blu-Ray disc of Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire and the three shorts included as bonus content, we missed the Arbuckle movies but I got to watch A Day’s Pleasure, an unusually rare Chaplin short from 1919 that I’d never seen before. At least part of the reason was that from the time Chaplin signed with First National Pictures in 1918 he owned all his subsequent movies outright, and many of them were not seen again until the 1970’s when Chaplin went over them, prepared background musical scores, and sometimes re-edited them for official reissues. A Day’s Pleasure is a minor Chaplin film, created while Chaplin was concentrating on bigger things: specifically his feature-film debut, The Kid (1920). (The Kid was one film Chaplin severely screwed up when he re-edited it for the 1970’s reissue; if you can locate a copy of the original public-domain version, grab it!) Chaplin had already signed Jackie Coogan to play the title role of The Kid, and in order to screen-test him he gave him a minor role in A Day’s Pleasure. A Day’s Pleasure is different from the run-of-the-mill Chaplin film in at least one particular: though he’s mostly dressed in the familiar “Tramp” costume, with a jacket too small for him and pants too large, he’s not playing lower-class here (and his shoes are the right size instead of too big for his feet, as they were in the full-out “tramp” costume): he’s sufficiently established in the working class to have a wife (Edna Purviance), two sons (Marion Feducha and Jackie Coogan), a stand-alone suburban home, and a Model “T” Ford car. The family set out on a weekend outing involving buying tickets for an excursion boat, and to get there Chaplin goes through an unequal struggle with his car’s hand crank. (Other cars had self-starters by 1919 but Henry Ford, anxious to keep costs down, still had the Model “T” equipped with a hand crank so you needed to start it manually – and a lot of people worried that the kickback from the crank would break their arms.) For some reason Chaplin keeps trying to get into his car via the right side – was he still thinking of how people drive in his native Britain? – and whenever he does that, the car shudders to a halt and the motor stops running, meaning he needs to get out and crank it again. He finally gets his trip going by literally crawling over Edna to get to the steering wheel. Once the family gets to the dock and gets on the boat, they have a new set of problems. The boat is starting to sail when Chaplin arrives and the only way he can get on is by using the body of a heavy-set woman (apparently played by Tom Wood in drag!) as a gangplank.

Once they’re all on the boat Chaplin finds that the seat next to Edna and their kids has been taken by a large, obnoxious fellow passenger (Tom Wilson) and his even larger and more obnoxious wife (Babe London). A Day’s Pleasure is one of Chaplin’s nastiest films, as he literally attacks the male passenger who’s got in his way and even at one point comes close to kicking him off the boat. (I remember one writer for The Nation who praised Chaplin’s comedy for delivering a good, swift kick in the pants to authority figures and others who needed it, but it occurred to me that over his career Chaplin got more kicks in the pants than he gave. Not in this movie, though.) There’s also a quite surprising scene in which Chaplin runs afoul of an all-Black jazz band playing on the deck of the excursion boat (and, though they appear to be genuinely Black instead of white actors in blackface, their names, with one exception, are listed on imdb.com only with initials: C. Allen, J. A. Irvin, El Sorral, and the one who actually gets a full name, John Williams – ironic in itself because a white man named John Williams is now, and has been for decades, the most prominent living film composer). That surprised me because, according to Theodore Huff’s 1947 biography of Chaplin, he'd said about Blacks, “I never laugh at their humor. They have suffered too much ever to be funny to me” – yet here he is doing a gag in which the Black trombone player tickles Chaplin’s upper lip with his slide so much Chaplin literally grabs the instrument and throws it overboard. (I felt too sorry for the poor guy losing his trombone to find it funny.) Chaplin also has an unequal (and extended) wrestling match with a deck chair he’s trying desperately and unsuccessfully to assemble, in a scene that seems to have been copied in just about every comedy taking place in a watercraft. He also trips over a sandwich vendor (Loyal Underwood) who got in his face. The family finally gets back from their cruise but that’s not the end of their troubles: Chaplin is stopped at an intersection by an officious cop who tells him to go back where he came from – an obvious impossibility in the highly crowded intersection. Then he bumps his car against a truck that’s carrying a barrel of highly sticky tar, which immobilizes the cop who was trying to ticket him. There’s one great gag scene in which one of the cops (there were two, one relatively lightweight and one heavy-set) falls down a manhole and then emerges again when its cover (obviously just a trash-can lid because a real manhole cover would have been way too heavy) pops open and he thrusts out. A Day’s Pleasure is minor Chaplin, but also proof that even the minor work of a genius can still be great.

The Ocean Between Them (10260287 Manitoba, Evoke Canadian Pictures, Evoke Entertainment, Corus Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 19) I bypassed Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” showing on Turner Classic Movies (he was doing the 1948 film Key Largo, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, in their final film together even though he had eight more years to live) and instead watched an O.K. Lifetime made-for-TV production, The Ocean Between Them. Directed (quite effectively) by Gabriel Correa from a committee-written script (Yuri Baranovsky, Angela Guiner, and Sam Lee get the writing credits), The Ocean Between Them is a well-made but pretty predictable thriller about an overprotective single mother, Joan Callahan (Rebecca Gayehart) and her two daughters, 20-something Miranda (Jessica Lord) and teenager Ashley (Georgia Dane). Joan has been overprotective ever since the backstory, when Miranda nearly died in a rock-climbing accident. Joan nursed her back to health in a hospital room that had two butterflies nesting outside its window but there’ve been tensions between them ever since. Joan wants Miranda to pull back from her free-swinging lifestyle as well as her drinking; when the film opens she and Ashley are impatiently waiting for Miranda’s plane to return from Rome, where Miranda has taken her latest vacation, to their small town in Oklahoma. Joan has peppered Miranda’s cell phone with increasingly frantic where-the-hell-are-you type calls, and just as they’ve about given up on her Miranda bursts in, obviously drunk. She swings her bag in the hall accidentally and breaks a ceramic vase, much to Joan’s consternation (fortunately at least the writers spared us the information that this was a vase worth five figures and/or a priceless family heirloom!). Miranda further upsets Joan by announcing that she’s only going to stay a day and a half before she goes on vacation again, this time to the (real) Caribbean island of Belize. Then Miranda has a look through some old photos of Joan in a box she was intending to put in storage, and she learns that Joan was quite the adventuress herself in her day, including taking wild trips that involved machete-wielding hikes through rain forests. After the girlfriend Miranda was intending to take with her to Belize bails, Miranda impulsively invites her mom to join her as her traveling companion (what arrangements they make for Ashley are not clear; maybe they trust her to be alone for the week or two they’re going to be gone, and in any event Ashley departs from the story completely once Miranda and Joan set off on their trip).

When they get to Belize they meet some charming young Black men who work at their resort, including headwaiter Isaac and his cousin, bartender Luke (Karl Walcott), who turns out to live most of the year in Dallas and just comes to Belize because his dad was from there until dad died some time before. The first night they’re there Miranda sneaks off for a rendezvous with Luke and spends the night with him, much to her mom’s understandable discomfiture (though there’s a hint that Joan was actually jealous and interested in Luke herself). The film’s main intrigue occurs when Miranda rents a kayak and for some reason ventures into the ocean, then gets caught in a couple of tropical storms. (The movie opened with a scene in which Miranda’s kayak is greeted by a shark, which then cuts to a flashback until the shark scene reappears two-thirds of the way into the running time.) The film cuts back and forth between Miranda’s ordeal at sea and Joan’s increasingly frantic attempts to get a rescue party to find her, which at one point involves her having to raise $1,200 in cash to hire a (white) private-plane pilot to look for her from the air. (What they were supposed to do for her if they’d spotted her was unclear; if the aircraft had been a helicopter they could at least theoretically have rescued her from it, but not with a plane.) Ultimately after both storms subside the local boat pilot, Captain Miguel Gonzalez (Adrian Garbutt), takes his boat out with Joan in hopes of finding her. At first they miss Miranda’s signal, but ultimately Miranda and Joan swim out to each other and she’s rescued at long last. Instead of the payoff I was expecting, which was that the two Callahans would forever swear off further adventuring, they talk about going on a trip to Alaska and riding dog-drawn sleds. I give director Correa a lot of credit for highly effective suspense editing (even though there’s not much doubt about the outcome; stories like this end unhappily all too often in real life, but not in Lifetime movies!) and even more credit for effectively and credibly reproducing the Caribbean off the coast of Manitoba in southern Canada, where the film was shot. I quite liked The Ocean Between Them even though it was all too predictable and the acting, though credible, wasn’t any great shakes. Rebecca Gayehart’s attitude as Joan just got to be really overbearing at times, and cinematographer Greg Nicod seemed to be going for too many shots of Jessica Lord in fashionable states of undress, with as much of her cleavage showing as he could dare for a basic-cable movie, rendering her less a sympathy-inducing victim than a bit of sexual delectation for any young straight men who might have stumbled onto the cable network that used to bill itself as “Television for Women”!

12 Years a Slave (Regency Enterprises, River Road Entertainment, Plan B Entertainment, New Regency Productions, Film4, Summit Entertainment, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 18) my husband Charles and I watched a compelling but also draining movie called 12 Years a Slave, made in 2013 by director Steve McQueen (an African-British filmmaker and not the legendary late white American action star of the 1960’s and 1970’s) from a script by John Ridley based on an 1853 slave memoir by Solomon Northup. Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was a free Black man living in Saratoga, New York in 1841 and making an occasional living as a violinist (Ejiofor looks credible playing the instrument, though Tim Fain was his soundtrack double). Then he was lured away from his relatively comfortable life with his wife Anne (Kelsey Scott), daughter Margaret (Quvenzhané Wallis), and son Alonzo (Cameron Zeigler) by two white entrepreneurs, Brown (Scoot McNairy) and Hamilton (Taran Killam). They say they want him to perform with their circus for two weeks, but they get him drunk on the first night and when he comes to he’s literally shackled and being held in a slave pen. He’s in the custody of slave dealers James H. Burch (Christopher Berry) and Theophilus Freeman (Paul Giamatti), who announce to him that he’s considered a runaway slave from Georgia named Platt. He’s sold to New Orleans (in Northup’s original memoir he mentions that a smallpox epidemic broke out among the slaves in his shipment and one of them died and was buried along the way, but this isn’t included in the movie) and ends up the property of plantation owner William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). Ford takes a liking to “Platt” and gives him a violin so he can entertain his guests at plantation “big house” parties, but his overseer Tibeats (Paul Dano) can’t stand him and rides him hard until Northup makes the mistake of fighting back, grabbing the whip with which Tibeats was about to beat him. Tibeats and his gang attempt to lynch Northup, and he’s strung up for hours until Ford finally comes along and rescues him. Ford has financial troubles and tries to get of them by selling Northup a.k.a. “Platt” to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender, who also starred in McQueen’s immediately previous film Shame), who’s described in the dialogue as “a notorious nigger-breaker.” (I like the fact that what’s usually and cutesily described these days as “the ‘N’-word” is used throughout this film, not only by white characters expressing their racism but by Black ones, often criticizing each other for having given in so totally to the slave mentality they’ve lost all will to resist.)

Epps is also having a decidedly nonconsensual affair – remember that under the laws of slavery a man had a legal right to rape anyone he owned because they were considered “property” – with Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), a slave on his plantation and either his star cotton-picker (she’s reported as picking over 500 pounds a day when everybody else is picking in the high 100’s or low 200’s) or getting her stats inflated by the owner’s obvious interest in her. Epps’s interest in Patsey is so obvious that his wife (Sarah Paulson) has got jealous of her, though when she complains to Epps he reminds her that she was just a poor white-trash girl he picked up in a bar and he can always send her back from whence she came. At one point, thinking of escape, Northup wanders through the woods, only to be discouraged when he comes upon a lynching party of poor whites who’d captured runaway slaves and, instead of returning them to their masters, just killed them. Northup hasn’t given up hope of contacting his family up North and getting them to lobby for his release, but when he puts together writing materials (stealing paper from a supply Mrs. Epps told him to buy her, carving his own pen, and making his ink from blackberry juice), he entrusts its delivery to Armsby (Garret Dillahunt). Armsby is a white former slave overseer who fell into alcoholism and ended up reduced to being a common field hand, picking cotton alongside the slaves he used to drive. But Armsby double-crosses Northup to Epps in hopes of getting his old overseer job back, and a frustrated Northup burns the letter he wrote his wife because for a slave it’s a whipping offense to know how to read and write. Meanwhile Patsey has sneaked off the Epps plantation to visit another one nearby, and Epps catches her and insists that she be whipped within an inch of her life. Epps seems to think Patsey was whoring herself to the other plantation owner, but she was really just asking for soap because the jealous Mrs. Epps had forbidden her to have any and without being able to bathe, she was starting to reek so much she was offended by her own smell. (Was Mrs. Epps hoping that by making Patsey literally stink, she’d get her husband to stop screwing her?) Patsey asks that Northup be assigned to administer the whipping, but Epps notices that Northup is pulling his blows, grabs the whip himself, and nearly kills Patsey with the force of his beating her. Then Patsey receives treatment with an improvised salve made by her fellow slaves, whose application seems to hurt her almost as much as the whipping did.

After years enduring the Kafkaesque torture of being wrongly enslaved, Northup is finally saved through an unlikely white deus ex machina, Bass (Brad Pitt, delivering a surprisingly sensitive performance), a building contractor from Canada who’s hired by Epps to build a gazebo on his property. Bass gets Northup to help with the construction, and while they’re working together he tells Northup that he’s morally opposed to slavery. Northup feels safe confiding in Bass despite what happened to him the last time he trusted a white man to help him, and he tells him his whole origin story. Bass promises to help, which he does by mailing Northup’s latest attempt to write his wife and children and getting Parker (Rob Steinburg), a store owner the Northups knew in New York, to come with him to Louisiana and identify Northup to the local sheriff as someone who’s legally free. Northup returns home to New York the free man he always was by law, and he meets his wife, and children (now grown adults; Margaret is played by Devyn A. Tyler and she has a husband, played by Willo Jean-Baptiste, and a child of her own, so Northup learns he’s a grandfather). A printed epilogue states that Northup tried to have his abductors prosecuted but couldn’t because in Washington, D.C., where the initial crime took place, Blacks were not allowed to testify in court against whites. Instead he became an activist for abolition and wrote a memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (note that Northup’s title began with the word “Twelve” while the film’s begins with the numeral), which he dedicated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe noted that Northup had spent his twelve years as a slave in the Red River country of Louisiana, where Stowe had set her novel, and she used his memoir as a counter to people who accused her of making up the story out of whole cloth to make slavery look bad. At least partly because of Stowe’s endorsement, Northup’s book sold three times as many copies as Frederick Douglass’s memoir of his years as a slave.

Northup ended his book with these words: “My narrative is at an end. I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery. Those who read this book may form their own opinions of the ‘peculiar institution.’ What it may be in other States, I do not profess to know; what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these pages. This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana. But I forbear. Chastened and subdued in spirit by the sufferings I have borne, and thankful to that good Being through whose mercy I have been restored to happiness and liberty, I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps.” (Ironically, it’s not known when and where Northup died, or where his remains ended up; modern historian Joseph Logsdon, who co-edited a 1968 republication of Twelve Years a Slave, planned to make a search but died himself before he could do so.) Though 12 Years a Slave is a powerful denunciation of slavery as it existed in the American South in the 1840’s and the 1850’s, I did feel after a while that I was being manipulated. I wondered whether screenwriter Ridley had cherry-picked Northup’s memoir to highlight the most brutal aspects of his experience, or whether Northup himself had done so when he wrote his original book. Modern critic Eric Herschtal has acknowledged, “Slave narratives were never intended to give an unbiased view. They were anti-slavery polemics meant to bring down the institution.”

Technically, 12 Years a Slave is a well-made movie; while director McQueen and his cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, occasionally falls into past-is-brown effects (perhaps justifying it because when their movie takes place, nighttime illumination still relied on candles and occasionally lamps), much of the film takes place during bright daylight. There’s an almost tactile sense of the beauty of the countryside and an ironic contrast with the horrific events taking place in it. Also McQueen and Bobbitt include a few gimmicky visuals, including the sight of a paddle-wheel steamer churning up the river water, for the most part they shoot the film plainly and effectively. Ironically, Charles had the opposite reaction to the film than I did; he thought there were too many scenes of the slaves celebrating each other, washing each other (it occurred to me that a large part of the racist myth that Blacks smell worse than whites is a legacy of both slavery and the subsequent plantation sharecropping system that condemned most of them to farm labor, which among other things gave them few opportunities to wash), singing spirituals and, in one remarkable scene, sending off a dead comrade to “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” (For some reason, Nicholas Britell, who assisted composer Hans “Room Man” Zimmer in writing the film’s score, junked the song’s beautiful original melody and wrote one of his own.) There’s even one strange scene in which the slave masters are getting their slaves to sing a rather strange song called “Run, Nigger, Run,” which was one of the old African-American folk songs Alan and John Lomax collected in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It seemed bizarre, to say the least, that white slave owners would encourage their slaves to sing a song that at least appears to celebrate a slave’s escape. There are also a few scenes showing the carefully sanitized version of Christianity the masters were teaching their slaves, one which emphasized the duty of slaves to submit to their owners and downplayed all that stuff about the Israelites escaping bondage. (I’ve heard elsewhere that there was a special “slaves’ Bible” – which white ministers read to the slaves because slaves were punished severely if they learned to read or write – which cut the entire Book of Exodus down to just three chapters.) After we watched the film I joked to Charles that if Verdi had been submitted this script as an opera libretto, he probably would have turned it down as too extreme and downbeat.

I also thought a lot about the 1942 Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur masterpiece I Walked with a Zombie, and in particular of how much more courage it took to make an anti-racist film in 1942 than it did in 2013. Though I Walked with a Zombie takes place in the 1942 present, well after the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1834 (31 years before the U.S. did it, and without having to endure a civil war over it), it’s clear that the rich white characters are all suffering from the moral burden of still living lives of privilege based on fortunes accumulated from slave labor. My admiration for I Walked with a Zombie (despite its horrible title) has grown over the years, especially when I realized the significance of Val Lewton having tried to talk David O. Selznick out of making Gone with the Wind; maybe instead of doubting the commercial appeal of Margaret Mitchell’s romanticization of the ante-bellum South and its “peculiar institution,” Lewton was giving it a “woke” reading, seeing the depiction of slavery in Gone with the Wind as the racist nonsense it is. By now virtually everyone in the U.S. (with occasional exceptions like Florida Governor Ron De Santis, who’s on record as making the preposterous claim that slavery benefited the slaves by teaching them manual skills) pretty much agrees that slavery was a terrible thing. It’s a point underscored in one of the few genuinely subtle scenes in 12 Years a Slave, in which slaves are being examined by potential purchasers as if they were livestock and one slave dealer boasts that a particular piece of merchandise “hasn’t been sick a day in his life.” (Today he'd be a used-car dealer similarly assuring the would-be buyer that the car he’s selling has never been in an accident.) At least the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave 12 Years a Slave the Best Picture award – it still rankles me that six years later they gave the Best Picture Oscar to Green Book, a liberal film in which the Black characters exist merely to provide moral redemption to the white ones, instead of a radical masterpiece like Black Panther in which the Black characters (even the unsympathetic ones) have agency and independence – but as I noted above, the kind of up-front anti-racist stance Lewton and Tourneur took in I Walked with a Zombie (and probably got away with only because it was written off as another cheap horror “B” with a lurid title) in 1942 really wasn’t that much of a risk, either artistically or commercially, in 2013.