Angela Harvey, Rodney Chester, and Nathan Hale Williams: Three Black Queer Artists Expressing Themselves in Movies

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

My husband Charles and I spent five days, October 8-12, in Riverside, California for the annual Convocation of the Unity Fellowship Movement. One of the most fascinating events we went to during the convocation was a combination film screening and question-and-answer session held at the Riverside LGBTQ+ Center featuring filmmakers Angela Harvey and Nathan Hale Williams and actor Rodney Chester. Harvey and Chester were both present from the opening of the session, though Williams arrived later and Harvey left early due to another commitment. Harvey and Chester both projected enormous charisma; Harvey was dressed in skin-tight blue jeans and a simple top, while Chester looked electrifying in a powder-blue suit. Harvey’s film was called Black Rainbow Love, and was 45 minutes of interviews with African-American Lesbians and Gay men in coupled relationships with other Black partners. She said that she was having problems finding a distributor for it because at 45 minutes it’s too long to be a short and too short to be a feature. She also said that it wasn’t taken seriously by a number of the film festivals to which she submitted it because it only had two people credited with being on the crew: herself as producer, director, and writer, and Ken Branson as cinematographer and editor (though Harvey said she’d done a lot of the editing herself). Completed in 2022, it’s sort of a modern updating of the classic Queer documentary Word Is Out (1977) specifically focused on Black Queer people and the dual struggles they face with both racism and homophobia. (Blessed be, Harvey did not use the horrible jargon word “intersectionality.”) Harvey identified herself as a single Lesbian, though she’d been routinely coupled until 2019, when she finally realized she’d had a history of being trapped in co-dependent relationships and needed to break free of emotional commitments to other people.

To me the most interesting of Harvey’s interviewees were Deidre Gray, a Transwoman from the Midwest, and Rayceen Pendarvis, an older woman who said she’d been a mentor and substitute mother to a lot of Queer people who’d been cast adrift by their families of origin. Almost inevitably given that the director was a Lesbian, Black Rainbow Love featured more women than men, but Harvey proved to be a sensitive interviewer with a knack for getting her subjects to reveal themselves. After the movie I suggested that she should do a follow-up about African-American Lesbians and Gay men involved in interracial relationships – and Harvey, much to my surprise, took the suggestion well and didn’t challenge me to make such a film myself. In her opening presentation she stressed that she’s nearly 60 years old and had never even thought of becoming a filmmaker until she did this one, though she’d worked as a writer on the cable TV series Teen Wolf. Mostly she’s a motivational speaker, counselor, self-described “GROWTHologist,” and also a writer and poet who was selling two books at the event, an adult coloring book called Colorful Growth and a poetic memoir called Poetic Alchemy: Seven Intentions for Healing, Personal Growth, and Transformation. Rodney Chester turned out to have been an actor mainly known for his role as part of the cast of Noah’s Arc, a cable TV series that had a two-year run (2004-2006) on the Queer-themed network Logo. He said that despite the fact that Noah’s Arc was the most popular show on Logo for the short time it ran, it was canceled because the network couldn’t find a sponsor – which an audience member said reminded him of the fate of Nat “King” Cole’s 1957 variety show on NBC, which also didn’t draw a sponsor because no one wanted to have their product identified with a show featuring a Black host. Chester recalled that there was a lot of pressure from Logo to introduce white characters into Noah’s Arc, which the producers resisted because they wanted to keep the show all-Black and focused on the issues specifically faced by Black Gay men. He said that the actor who played his partner on the show was straight in real life, and it was a professional challenge for Chester not to cross the line that would make his co-star uncomfortable with physical displays of affection between them.

The rights to Noah’s Arc ended up with Paramount, which produced a feature-film version released this year. The feature includes the same actors as they’ve naturally aged, and one twist in the movie is that the baby he and his partner were raising in the original series has grown up and come out as Transgender. Chester also had a supporting role in the next film shown as part of the afternoon, Nathan Hale Williams’s and Jennia Frederique’s 90 Days (2016), a 20-minute short produced by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in association with Williams’s own production company, iN-Hale Entertainment, and Full Frequency Media. 90 Days seemed to me the weakest film on the program, not only because I’m still committed to the idea that we’ve been sold a bill of goods in being told that the whole cadre of diseases lumped together under the name AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) can be blamed on a single virus, the so-called HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), but because even if you accept the HIV/AIDS model as true, it’s awfully didactic. It centers around the straight relationship between Taylor (Nic Few) and Jessica (Teyonah Parris), who met at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles (which, by coincidence, Charles and I had recently visited on a day trip to L.A. and we recognized quite a few of the locations inside that incredible establishment) and had been dating for the titular 90 days. The issue between them was that Jessica had dodged any physical intimacy between them without telling Taylor why, and on the night in question Taylor brings over a red jewel case containing an engagement ring and plans to propose to Jessica – until she tells him that (shock!) she’s HIV positive. The most celebrity-adjacent actor in the movie is Pauletta Washington, Denzel Washington’s wife, who gave up her own acting career to raise their children. She plays Taylor’s mother Gayle, and her main function in the film is to question whether it’s wise for Taylor to marry a woman he’s known such a short time. Williams, who wrote 90 Days solo as well as co-directing it with Jennia Frederique (who also is in the film in a supporting role), dared to leave the ending open rather than tell us definitively whether Taylor does or does not let the fact that Jessica is HIV positive break up their relationship. One member of the audience, apparently having missed the import of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s logo being on the credits, thought that the big reveal was going to be that Jessica was a Transwoman.

The third and last film on the program was All Boys Aren’t Blue, a 2021 adaptation of a young-adult novel by George M. Johnson, also directed by Nathan Hale Williams and produced by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation along with Williams’s own iN-Hale Productions and All Tea No Shade Productions. Johnson’s novel was published in 2020 and has become one of the most frequently banned books in the U.S. due to its open addressing of the issues facing a young Black Queer growing up in this country. (It was the number three most banned book in the U.S. in 2021, the second most in 2022 and 2023, and the most banned in 2024.) The film adapts three vignettes from Johnson’s book: a story of how they were (since Johnson has come out as non-binary the plural pronoun is appropriate) beaten up by bullies at age five (they were out with two older cousins and they were attacked by six larger boys, one of whom literally kicked most of Johnson’s teeth out, leading to them getting adult teeth way ahead of schedule and being literally unwilling to smile); a portrait of their grandmother Nanny (Jenifer Lewis), the only supportive member of their family; and their account of pledging the most prestigious Black college fraternity and having to deal with the other members’ homophobia. George Johnson is played by three different people: Thomas Hobson as a child, Dyllon Burnside as the one who relates the story of Nanny, and Bernard David Jones as a college student. The result was an incredibly powerful film that, at 40 minutes, has the same problem as Black Rainbow Love: it’s too long to be a short and too short to be a feature. Williams and Rodney Chester joined forces for an hour-long Q&A that addressed the difficulties of getting Black- and Queer-themed films out to a mass audience. They were originally supposed to show a fourth film, Come Together: Art’s Power for Change, a making-of documentary about the groundbreaking 2006 film Dirty Laundry, the story of a young urban Gay Black man who’s summoned to the Southern home where he grew up to deal with a family crisis. The film was intended as a tribute to Dirty Laundry’s director, the late Maurice Jamal, but the event ran too long for them to be able to show it. Nonetheless, Williams and Chester paid homage to Jamal’s ability not only to get the feature made but to recruit name actors like Rockmond Dunbar and Loretta Devine to be in it. All in all, the event was a tribute to the power and persistence of these Black Queer artists not only to get their films made but to present them to the public as best they can and do their level best to build an audience for Black Queer cinema.

Play Dirty (Amazon MGM Studios, Big Indie Pictures, Modern Pictures, Screen New South Wales, Servo Production Services, 2025)

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

My husband Charles and I spent most of the last week out of town at a religious convocation of the Unity Fellowship Church, and as a result I hadn’t been able to update the moviemagg blog for over a week. We stayed in an old house we took as a vacation rental, and it included a television in the living room but one that was not connected to any regular network broadcasts. As a result, I was unable to watch the Law and Order shows on Thursday, October 10, as usual. Instead Charles found an intriguing and reasonably entertaining “caper” film on Amazon.com’s Prime streaming service called Play Dirty, directed and co-written by Shane Black and loosely based on the character of Parker, created by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym “Richard Stark.” Black’s writing collaborators were Chuck Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, and the three came up with a bizarre tale in which Parker (Mark Wahlberg) and associates Philly Webb (Thomas Jane) and Zen (Rosa Salazar) hatch a plot to rob a horse-racing track of its daily bet collections. (Charles questioned whether a racetrack would still be collecting its bets in cash in 2025.) The heist goes off successfully, though in a series of grimly amusing scenes Parker’s getaway car ends up driving on the racetrack and alternately spooking and actually crashing into the horses. But Zen brutally shoots Philly and the others involved in the robbery, and Parker escapes only by falling into a river and letting its currents carry him away. Parker recuperates at the home of Philly’s widow Grace (Gretchen Mol) and swears to her he’ll avenge her husband’s murder. To this end, Parker seeks out an old friend named Grofeld (LaKeith Stanfield), who runs a struggling theatre company that somehow manages to stay in business even though almost no one ever attends its plays. (The clear implication is that Grofeld is using it as a front to launder money.)

Parker and Grofeld track down Zen’s associate Reggie, who tells them that Zen is actually a trained assassin for a Latin American country (technically unspecified but pretty obviously Peru). Zen killed everyone involved in Parker’s heist but Parker himself and made off with the loot to underwrite an even bigger crime: the theft of priceless treasures dredged up on the sea floor from the wreckage of an old Spanish galleon. Zen’s country is ruled by a corrupt dictator named De La Paz (Alejandro Edda), and though he’s technically donated the treasure to the United Nations for display as an art exhibit, he plans to steal it and use the money to keep himself in power. To do this he’s hired a criminal syndicate called “The Outfit” headed by Lozini (Tony Shalhoub). Zen’s plan is to steal the treasure herself before De La Paz can get his hands on it and use the money to feed her people. Their contact to pull this off is Bosco (Andrew Ford), only Parker shoots and kills him before he and Zen can get the necessary information. Parker traces Bosco’s lieutenant Kincaid (Nat Wolff) and drops him out of a high-rise window, but Kincaid miraculously survives. The plot is that The Outfit will enter the location through a weak spot in the New York subway system and Parker’s crew will haul the loot away in garbage trucks after they derail the subway train. Only “The Outfit” moves the date of the heist up one day, so Parker and his crew have to put their plan in action a day early. Zen seduces Parker as part of the plot, arousing the jealousy of her boyfriend Mateo (Gabriel Alvarado), who kidnaps Parker and takes him to The Outfit. Previously, Parker and his crew found out that The Outfit got wind of what was going on and replaced the priceless treasure with worthless rocks.

The only thing they can still steal and make any money from is the $500 million golden figurehead from the ship that carried the treasure in the first place, which The Outfit had planned to sell to billionaire technocrat Phineas Paul (Chukwudi Iwuji). They do so, but when they have it Parker discovers it’s a fake (can you say The Maltese Falcon?). Then they trace the real one, only it’s been booby-trapped with explosives and, rather than let The Outfit and their corrupt employer get it, Parker blows it up, though he’s eventually able to profit from the heist by harvesting the jewels it contained. Zen tries to get Parker to flee with him and start a new life somewhere else, saying that she’s now genuinely in love with him and wasn’t just faking it for her own ends. Parker grimly tells her that he was faking it, and kills her to avenge Philly and the other people from the original heist whom Zen killed. When Play Dirty was over I commented to Charles, “It’s The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle meet John Wick.” The sheer relentlessness of the death toll severely hampered my enjoyment of it, and I couldn’t help but recall that when John Huston made The Maltese Falcon he was able to create a plot (as Dashiell Hammett already had with his source novel) that was suffused with violence and the threat of it even though only three people actually get killed. Charles pointed out that Play Dirty ripped off a lot of other heist movies as well, but those were the models that stood out for me. It’s actually fairly well acted; Mark Wahlberg is surprisingly credible as the sort of good-bad guy he’s playing, one we’re kept rooting for even though he’s a pretty despicable slice of humanity. Rosa Salazar makes a good classic film noir-style femme fatale, and I especially liked Chukwudi Iwuji as the arrogant tech gazillionaire who believes his money and economic power sets him above the common run of everyday humanity, including the rules the rest of us have to live by.

The Talk of Hollywood (Prudence Pictures, Sono-Art World-Wide Pictures, Mark Sandrich Productions, RCA Photophone Studios, 1929)

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

On Sunday, October 12, the night my husband Charles and I got back from the Unity Fellowship Convocation in Riverside, California, we watched an intriguing movie on YouTube: The Talk of Hollywood, a 1929 film directed by Mark Sandrich (whose key claim to fame is directing five of the 10 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies) and shot at the RKO Photophone Studios in New York. The Talk of Hollywood was basically a vehicle for Jewish dialect comedian Nat Carr, whom we’d previously encountered only in a 1930 short called Two Plus Fours, shot in Hollywood and with a minor part for The Rhythm Boys, featuring the young Bing Crosby. The Talk of Hollywood casts Carr as J. Pierpont Ginsburg, a Jewish movie producer whose studio is about to go out of business because he sunk a lot of money into a slate of silent pictures just as the talkie transition happened. (In real life a lot of producers with that problem solved it, more or less, by spackling talking or sound sequences into already completed silent films, where they generally stood out like the proverbial sore thumbs.) Ginsburg is raising Ruth (Hope Sutherland), his daughter by his late wife whom he still mourns and even hallucinates that she’s in the same room with him. Ginsburg’s attorney, young John Applegate (Sherling Oliver, whose first name is misspelled “Sherline” in the credits), is in love with Ruth and also has enough money invested that when the budget on Ginsburg’s first talkie is blown because a whole day’s shooting was lost because the sound recording equipment malfunctioned, he’s able to raise the money Ginsburg needs to reshoot the sequence.

The film-within-the-film stars “Adoré Renée,” a character name writers Sandrich, Carr, and Darby Anderson obviously intended as a spoof of real-life star Renée Adorée (born Jeanne de la Fonte in France in 1898; I’d always assumed that ridiculous name was a Hollywood pseudonym, but it turned out she concocted it herself out of the French words for “reborn” and “adored”). She’s played by a New York-born actress named Fay Marbé, who’s given an introductory credit announcing that this was her first talking picture. It was also her last picture, talking or otherwise; she’d made four silents, including an uncredited bit as a dancer in D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921) and the lead in a German film called Dorine und der Zufall (“Dorine and Chance,” 1928), but she never made another movie even though she lived until 1986. She also got her brother, Gilbert Marbé, a small role in the film. The scenes showing Marbé and a chorus line of dancers (played by the Leonidoff ballet troupe even though the dances they do have little in common with ballet) performing on a cabaret set are easily the most entertaining in the film. It’s obvious the scenes were still being shot live, with picture and sound recorded at the same time, and Al Goodman’s orchestra (advertised by connection with their stage hit, a golfing musical called Follow Thru) had to accompany Marbé and the Leonidoff dancers as best they could. Thanks to Applegate’s $10,000 last-minute investment, the film is completed, but the initial screening goes haywire because the arrogant projectionist (Tom O’Brien) accidentally breaks the record containing the soundtrack to reel one. (I wondered why a movie shot with the RCA Photophone sound-on-film process had, as a major plot point, that the film-within-the-film was shot with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process.)

The projectionist plays the record for reel two while showing the film of reel one, and so on, until the screening limps to a close and the audience proclaim it the worst film ever made. Ginsburg needed the audience to like it because they were comprised of film buyers for theatre chains, so his entire financial future was riding on them liking the film enough to pay good money to screen it. He’s bailed out by one film buyer who loves the (unintentional) comedy of the movie and hires Ginsburg to produce six more like it (shades of the ending to another Hollywood spoof, Once In a Lifetime, made three years later!). Applegate and Ruth get married and Ginsburg’s studio is saved. The Talk of Hollywood isn’t much as a movie; Charles said he’d run across a mention of it online that had said it would have been much better as a short, and the online writer probably meant releasing the cabaret scene without the rest of it might have been more entertaining. Fay Marbé’s act anticipates Fifi D’Orsay’s but is a good deal less oppressive, and Nat Carr for the most part delivers Jewish schtick humor but gets a few lines in that are actually funny. Where The Talk of Hollywood doesn’t deliver is anything that innovative; one would hardly think from this movie that within four years Mark Sandrich would make a film as dazzlingly inventive as Melody Cruise, an hour-long musical with Phil Harris and Charlie Ruggles that anticipated the Astaire-Rogers musicals and got Sandrich his assignments to direct them. The actors mostly play in the horrible early-talkie style in which they speak … very … slowly and pause … between hearing their … cue line and … delivering their own. There is a nice on-screen dance between Marbé and her partner that could be said to anticipate the Astaire-Rogers classics, though you’d have to know that Sandrich directed them five times to make the connection.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (20th Century-Fox, 1957)

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

Last night (Tuesday, October 14) I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that’s one of my all-time favorites: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a 1957 satiric near-masterpiece written, directed, and produced by Frank Tashlin and starring Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? began life as a Broadway play by George Axelrod in 1955. It was a Faust-like story in which the leading man was George McCauley (Orson Bean), a fan-magazine writer who wins the assignment to interview movie sex goddess Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield). Axelrod was inspired to write the play after Billy Wilder extensively rewrote his previous play The Seven-Year Itch to satisfy the dictates of the Hollywood Production Code, including changing a key plot point. In Axelrod’s play the hapless married man whose wife and kids have left him alone for the summer actually has sex with “The Girl Upstairs.” In Wilder’s film he doesn’t make it anywhere near the bedroom with her except in his outrageously funny fantasies. Axelrod clearly based the character of Rita Marlowe on Marilyn Monroe, who had starred in the film version of The Seven-Year Itch opposite Tom Ewell, who’d played the male lead on stage as well. Axelrod used his Hollywood experiences to create a farce about a man who literally sells his soul to the devil for success in the movie business. 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights to Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? mainly to get Mansfield out of her run-of-the-play contract, and Tashlin threw out Axelrod’s whole plot, retaining only the character of Rita Marlowe.

Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Axelrod’s original title was Will Success Spoil Rock Hudson?, but the real Rock Hudson’s agent, Henry Willson, threatened to sue if Hudson’s name was used in the title) turned into a wicked satire of the advertising business and the whole American ideal of “success.” Tashlin also made Rock Hunter an integral character and, indeed, the male lead. His full name is Rockwell P. Hunter and he’s played by Tony Randall as a sort of quivering mass of exasperation. Hunter is a low-level executive for an advertising agency run by Irving LaSalle, Jr. (the marvelously droll British actor John Williams, who’d played a similar role in Richard Quine’s 1956 film The Solid Gold Cadillac, a similar but less acerbit satire of capitalism). Hunter and his immediate supervisor, Henry Rufus (Henry Jones), are worried that if the LaSalle agency loses its biggest account, Stay-Put Lipstick, the agency could go out of business and everyone associated with it would be out of a job. Rufus, who is so flustered at the prospect of immediate unemployment he admits he’s “drinking my lunch,” and Hunter brainstorm ideas for a campaign that will keep the Stay-Put account. Hunter is raising his teenage niece April (Lili Gentle) as a single parent and he’s also engaged to his secretary, Jenny Wells (Betsy Drake). April is the president of one of Rita Marlowe’s fan clubs and Hunter, finding his niece’s wall plastered with photos of Rita, figures that if he can get Rita Marlowe, billed in the ads for her movies as “The Girl with the Oh-So-Kissable Lips,” to endorse Stay-Put Lipstick, he’ll be able to save the agency and his job.

Meanwhile, Rita has just left Hollywood for New York to form her own production company and to study serious acting (two years after the real Marilyn Monroe had done just that). Rita runs into Rock and makes a pass at him, ostensibly just to make her boyfriend, muscleman Bobo Branigansky (Mickey Hargitay, Mansfield’s real-life husband at the time and father of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit star Mariska Hargitay), jealous. Only Rita is so astonished by Rock’s kiss that she immediately proclaims him her “Lover Boy” and plans to dump Bobo for Rock for real. The news of Rita’s unlikely new flame makes all the world’s newspapers except the New York Times, and Rock literally finds himself being mobbed on the streets by teenage girl fans who rip his suit to shreds to grab for souvenirs. LaSalle and Rufus insist that Rock continue his relationship with Rita in order to get her signature on the Stay-Put Lipstick endorsement contract – only there is no relationship. Jenny understandably gets jealous and beans both Rock and Rufus (the latter by mistake) with her potted plants. The agency plots to produce a TV special featuring Rita Marlowe introducing her endorsement of Stay-Put Lipstick – in one of Tashlin’s cleverer spoofs of both television and advertising, they announce at the beginning of the show that there will be no commercials, but they build the Stay-Put plugs into the show itself wherever they can – and the success of the project propels Rock first into a vice-presidency and the much-prized key to the executive washroom (three years before Axelrod’s nemesis, Billy Wilder, made that a key plot point of The Apartment!), and then into the presidency of the agency after LaSalle decides to quit his job and spend the rest of his working life breeding roses. In fact, all the leading characters make a 1960’s-style retreat from the pressures of success and fame: Rock and Jenny get married and start a chicken farm, LaSalle becomes a successful rose grower, and Rita ends up with the boy back home she never fell out of love with, George Schmidlap – played by Groucho Marx, 24 years after he and his brothers had made one of the greatest satires of all time, Duck Soup.

Groucho, who by then had made his comeback hosting the TV quiz show You Bet Your Life, turns to the camera (as he did so often in the Marx Brothers’ films) and says he’s glad at last to be on a TV show that isn’t burdened by commercials – only then he turns his back to the camera and we see a “Stay-Put Lipstick” neon sign strapped across his back. Tashlin studs the film with plenty of bizarre sequences, including an opening credit showing Tony Randall playing bass as part of an on-screen band supposedly rendering the 20th Century-Fox fanfare and announcing the cast, then being unable to remember the film’s title. Once the movie starts, we see a grimly funny series of spoofs of TV commercials for various products, and in the middle of the movie Randall steps out of character and delivers a jeremiad about the defects of television. He points out that it only has a 21-inch screen (and that was considered unusually large then!), it’s all in black-and-white (though when Rita’s big special comes on the announcer says it will be in “contemptible color – oops, compatible color”), the horizontal and vertical parts of the image flip around (real-life problems people my age vividly remember from the days of over-the-air TV), and at one point we hear Tony Randall talking but all we see is his midsection until the camera pans up. The main thing I love about Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is it’s one of many indications from books, plays, and films actually made in the 1950’s that the era was considerably less enamored of “success” than the propaganda of Right-wing politicians have made it out to be. Books like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, and C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite questioned not only the cult of “success” but the capitalist society that underlay it. In its depiction of the idiocy of fame and how quickly it is bestowed on people and then cruelly taken away again, as well as its cynical attitude towards consumer culture and the advertising industry that sells it to people, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? seems all too timely today!

The Pagan (MGM, 1929)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 5) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” offering of a film on the cusp of the silent-sound transition: The Pagan, made in 1929 by MGM as a vehicle for their big silent star, Ramon Novarro. It was a follow-up to their highly successful film from one year before, White Shadows in the South Seas, which had begun as a project for the legendary documentarian Robert Flaherty. White Shadows was the first of Van Dyke’s “expeditionary films,” not only taking place in exotic locales but actually shot there, that later included Trader Horn (1931), Cuban Love Song (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), and Eskimo (1933). Van Dyke, whose full name was Woodbridge (not Woodrow, as a lot of people assumed) Strong Van Dyke, made The Pagan as the immediate follow-up to White Shadows and got assigned Novarro, who had become a star mainly because director Rex Ingram had drafted him as Rudolph Valentino’s replacement after Valentino left Metro and went to Paramount following the successes of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Conquering Power (both 1921). Ingram cast Novarro in The Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche (both 1922), and they did well enough that though Ingram departed Hollywood after the merger that formed MGM (he set up his own production company and made his films in Europe at the Vittorine Studio in Nice, France), Novarro became a big enough star that he was tapped to play the lead in the 1926 silent version of Ben-Hur. (I still think that’s a better film than the 1959 remake, and one of the reasons it’s better is that Novarro’s rather nellie persona actually works better for the character than Charlton Heston’s outright machismo in the remake.)

By the time Van Dyke and crew returned home from having shot The Pagan in Tahiti (the opening credits announce that the film was “Produced and photographed in the Paumotu Islands of the South Seas,” but the “Paumoto Islands” don’t actually exist and the film’s imdb.com page suggests it was a pseudonym for the Tuamotos, which were part of French Polynesia and whose most prominent island was Tahiti, where the film was actually made), sound had come to motion pictures and a silent movie was unreleasable without some sort of soundtrack. So MGM’s executives went to work, commissioning Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed to write a theme song for the film, “Pagan Love Song,” and have Novarro and co-star Dorothy Janis sing it on screen – sort of. It’s obvious that Van Dyke and crew merely pre-recorded the song and dubbed it onto the soundtrack more or less in synch with silent footage of Novarro singing, or doing something resembling singing. There are a couple of brief scenes in which Novarro’s lip movements come close enough to matching his voice to be credible, but for the most part it’s all too obvious that they tried as best they could to match footage of Novarro moving his lips in vague synchronization to his recorded voice. (One wonders why they didn’t send a crew out to Catalina Island, Hollywood’s all-purpose double for the South Seas, and shoot Novarro’s big musical number properly. But then they wouldn’t have been able to advertise the film as photographed entirely in the South Seas.) The Pagan had a weird set of trifurcated writing credits: John Russell got credit for the story, Dorothy Farnum for the scenario (which usually in the silent era meant a list of scenes that briefly described what would be occurring when and in what order), and John Howard Lawson for the titles. Lawson’s Left-wing politics were readily apparent in some of them, especially one in which the boom town that’s risen on the previously pristine island is described as “six barrooms and a bank.”

Plot-wise, The Pagan is a mixture of the beautiful and the silly: the two leads, Henry Shoesmith, Jr. (Ramon Novarro) and Tito (Dorothy Janis), are both mixed-race products of liaisons between white fathers and Polynesian mothers. Only they grew up quite differently: Henry was raised by his Polynesian mother basically to lay around all day and loaf, while Tito ended up in the custody of the film’s villain, Roger Slater (Donald Crisp). Slater was determined to raise her to be a white woman, forcing her to attend the local Christian church (where there’s a marvelous sequence of the mostly Polynesian congregation singing the hymn “Jesus Loves Me” in Tahitian), dress in white people’s clothes, study white people’s concept of sin, and get horrifically punished whenever she slips and starts acting like a Polynesian. Slater is also determined to grab the coconut plantation Henry inherited from his white father and profiteer off it. He approaches Henry for the right to work the plantation and harvest the coconuts for copra (which is what coconut meat becomes when it dries; it’s useful for extracting soap and oil) “at a fair price,” and just when we’re bracing ourselves for the evil Slater to offer Henry a low-ball deal, Henry gives him the rights to his coconut crop for nothing at all, saying, “If I try to eat too many, I get sick.” Henry’s appalling naïveté about financial matters is the most annoying thing about this movie; later, after being lectured by Slater that he needs to restock the store his dad left him by borrowing money, expanding his inventory, and ultimately making money, Henry borrows the money and sells the goods, all right, but he makes all his sales on credit and doesn’t even try to collect. Instead he just writes how much he’s theoretically owed in a ledger book and then borrows more money – until Slater, who to no one’s surprise turns out to be the owner of Henry’s debt, calls in his loans and forecloses on him, taking the store.

Along the way we’re introduced to a fourth character, an island prostitute named Madge, played by an actress with the grandly phony screen name “Renée Adorée.” (I’d always assumed that name was a Hollywood concoction, but it was actually her own idea; she was born Jeanne de la Fonte, but she decided to name herself after the French words for “reborn” and “adored.”) We know Madge is a prostitute because Slater throws her off his ship and grandly thunders, “We don’t want your kind of woman around here.” Madge hooks up platonically with Henry – who has eyes only for Tito – and where I thought this was going was that Madge would become Henry’s partner in the store and teach him viable business practices. Instead Madge just hangs around the fringes of the action. Henry and Tito have an innocent flirtation that consists mostly of them chasing each other around the gorgeous Polynesian scenery and throwing water at each other. But that’s all too nasty for Slater, whom we realize after a brief scene of him stroking Tito’s hair is interested in her not only socially but sexually. Slater forces Tito to marry him at the local church, and Henry responds by grabbing her and trying to swim to shore with her. Just then we see shark fins in the water and we think, “Oh, sharks ex machina.” Slater tries to chase them down in his boat, Henry and Tito try to get on it, Slater pushes them away … and just then, as Slater is flailing at Henry with a convenient cutlass he brought with him from the ship, Slater loses his balance and falls into the sea, where he becomes shark food and is conveniently eliminated so Henry and Tito can escape and settle down together in Henry’s mother’s old house in Tahiti’s native quarter.

If nothing else, The Pagan shows off the influence of Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) on just about every movie Hollywood made about Polynesia after that; not only is the visual quality similar – with heavy use of red filters and panchromatic film stock – there’s even a cop of Flaherty’s famous panning shot of a young boy climbing a coconut tree with a knife to cut the coconuts down. (Just about every movie made for the next several decades about a part of the world that grows coconuts contained that shot.) At times the movie looks wondrous – especially in the scenes in which Henry and Tito are having innocent fun together – and at times the scenes between Slater and the half-native characters get oppressive and dark. We’re already shown from a brief shot of Slater stroking Tito’s hair that his interest in her is more than to give her moral instruction and train her to live as a white woman. He’s also interested in her body – no surprise there! Both Charles and I were reminded of the famous play Rain, based on W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Miss Thompson,” about a minister who tries to “reform” a woman of proverbially loose morals and ends up lustfully falling for her himself. In fact, in The Pagan Slater forces Tito to go through a marriage ceremony, and Henry actually arrives too late to stop the wedding (anticipating The Graduate by 38 years!), though in the end that doesn’t matter because the sharks ex machina devour Slater before he can rape Tito and consummate the marriage. It’s also ironic that in 1934 the same director, W. S. Van Dyke, and the same star, Ramon Novarro, teamed up again for Laughing Boy, which is essentially the same plot as The Pagan only in this one Novarro’s character is a Native American, a Navajo, who falls in love with a Navajo girl (played by actress Lupe Velez, who like Novarro was Mexican by birth) who’d been raised by whites and taught to reject her own culture.

The Big Street (RKO, 1942)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 4) I watched a film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic movies a film that really isn’t noir at all, though it is a great movie: The Big Street, made at RKO in 1942 and produced by Damon Runyon, who also supplied the 1940 Collier’s magazine story “Little Pinks” on which it was based. Runyon also took his director, Irving Reis (pronounced “reese,” not “rice,” by the way), away from the low-budget Falcon detective series (where he’d just made The Falcon Takes Over, the first and quite good adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely, though it was remade in 1944 as Murder, My Sweet, which I’d name as the definitive film noir if I had to pick just one). There are a lot of great aspects to The Big Street, but the one that has put it on my list of all-time personal favorites is the casting of the female lead: Lucille Ball. Just about everybody who knows Lucille Ball at all knows her from I Love Lucy and the various spinoffs of it she made over the years, but her film work in the 1940’s proves that she was a considerably rangier actress than she got to show on TV. Indeed, one of the things she did best was spoiled gold-digging diva bitch, which she’d already done two years before in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance and repeated to perfection here. Ball was a graduate of the same acting school in New York, run by John Murray Anderson (director of most of the Ziegfeld Follies on stage and the stunning 1930 musical King of Jazz), that also taught Bette Davis. There’s a lot of La Davis in Ball’s performance here, and though the “suits” at RKO wanted a bigger “name” for the role (like Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur), Runyon, to his credit, insisted on Ball. The male lead, “Little Pinks,” a busboy who works at the club where Gloria Lyons (Lucille Ball), whom he nicknames “Your Highness,” entertains, is played by Henry Fonda on loan from 20th Century-Fox. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, Fonda had briefly dated Ball and Ball’s husband, Desi Arnaz, often showed up on set to make sure the two weren’t approaching intimacy again.

Eddie Muller showed The Big Street on “Noir Alley,” he explained, because though Runyon wasn’t really a noir writer, the pulp-magazine writers whose works formed the basis for most film noir copied Runyon’s unique style of language in making their crooks talk. The story portrays Gloria Lyons as an out-and-out gold-digger, already engaged to her employer, nightclub owner Case Ables (Barton MacLane at his Barton MacLaniest) but openly cruising besotted young rich kid Decatur Reed (William Orr) because he’s both wealthier and cuter than Ables. Half an hour into the movie, Ables gets rough with Gloria and knocks her down a flight of stairs in his club. The injury doesn’t look serious enough on screen to cause much damage, but we’re told that it’s permanently paralyzed her below the waist and put her life in imminent danger. Little Pinks, whose real last name is given as “Pinkard” at one point and “Pinkerton” thereafter, had already lost one busboy job at “Mindy’s” (read: Lindy’s) for breaking his concentration during an eating contest at Mindy’s to rescue Gloria’s dog, the only living creature of any species to whom she shows any genuine affection. Even before her accident Pinks has shown a devotion towards Gloria whose intensity verges on masochism. Afterwards he appoints himself as her caregiver, assisted in that regard by his friend Violette Shumberg (Agnes Moorehead), who’s dating Nicely Nicely Johnson (Eugene Pallette in a marvelously droll performance). When Nicely Nicely and Violette get married and relocate to Florida to open a barbecue restaurant and snack stand (where they sell, among other things, “Amos ‘n’ Andy” candies, a real food item of the time), Pinks is determined to take Gloria there even though he’s broke and has no way to take the trip except by walking. A group of typical Runyon characters, headed by Horsethief (Sam Levene) and “Professor B” (Ray Collins – so two Citizen Kane cast members are in this film!), club together to raise the money for them to take the train, but blow it all on a bad horse-racing bet.

In the scene I particularly remembered from the last time I saw this film, Pinks tries to take the wheelchair-bound Gloria through New York’s Holland Tunnel and gets into an argument with the people at the toll booth because the tunnel is supposed to be reserved for vehicles. “A wheelchair is a vehicle, ain’t it? It’s got wheels!” Pinks insists, and five uniformed officers of the Manhattan Transit Authority get into an argument over whether a wheelchair is a “vehicle.” Meanwhile, a number of truck drivers who are being held up by the argument angrily demand to be let into the tunnel, and one of them offers to pick up Pinks and Gloria and give them a ride as far as Baltimore. The film then turns into an oddball rehash of Fonda’s role in The Grapes of Wrath, as Pinks and Gloria make their way to Florida partly by hitching and partly by walking. When they finally make it to Florida they find that not only have Nicely Nicely and Violette made their way down there, so have most of the rest of the principals. Case Ables has opened a swanky new nightclub in Miami Beach and is also the mastermind of a jewel-thief ring in which the crooks steal valuable jewelry and then offer them back to the insurance companies that wrote the policies on them. Decatur Reed is there spending time on the beach and canoodling with non-disabled girls. Pinks stumbles onto the jewel-thief ring, learns of Ables’ involvement with it, and uses that knowledge to blackmail Ables into hosting a grand private party for Gloria at the club. Some of the Runyonesque crew even kidnap Decatur Reed and force him to attend the party. At the party, Gloria is fêted by guests who think she’s an Eastern European countess, and though she’s seated at a table she gets to sing a reprise of her big song from New York, “Who Knows?” (Ball’s voice was dubbed by Martha Mears, and to the filmmakers’ credit, instead of using the same pre-recording for both performances, they had Mears do separate ones, a self-assured reading for the New York scene pre-disability and a more nervous rendition for the Miami club.)

Ultimately Gloria demands to dance with Pinks, though the scene between them didn’t look convincing as an able-bodied man carrying a disabled woman (I spent decades of my life doing home care for people with disabilities, so I know something about this!). The scene reaches a climax when Gloria demands that Pinks take her up the club stairs to the big bay windows so she can look at the beach. She literally dies in his arms as he’s carrying her up the stairs. The End. The Big Street got great reviews at the time; James Agee said in Time that Ball “was born for the parts Ginger Rogers sweats over” and “tackles her ‘emotional’ role as if it were sirloin and she didn’t care who was looking.” Alas, it was Lucille Ball’s last role at RKO; shortly thereafter she turned down a proffered loanout to 20th Century-Fox and instead decamped to MGM, where her very next film, DuBarry Was a Lady, also cast her as a spoiled-brat gold-digging diva bitch with a proletarian boy (Red Skelton this time) hopelessly infatuated with her. DuBarry Was a Lady was also Ball’s first film in color, and it was for this one that MGM hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff had the idea to dye Ball’s hair flaming red because, as he put it, “Her soul is on fire.” Ball soldiered on at MGM for seven years and spent a lot of time hanging out with Buster Keaton, former MGM star who’d been hired back as a gagman for Red Skelton, and his old director, Edward Sedgwick. Keaton pleaded with the “suits” at MGM to give Ball roles in slapstick comedy, and their attitude was, “He’s just a burned-out old silent-era has-been – what does he know?” Then Ball scored I Love Lucy with Desi Arnaz producing as well as co-starring and became a TV superstar … as a slapstick comedienne.

Live at the Belly Up: The Fabulous Thunderbirds (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, October 3) I took advantage of my husband Charles’s relatively late work call (1 to 10 p.m.) to watch the latest installment of Live at the Belly Up on KPBS featuring a blues band called The Fabulous Thunderbirds. They’ve existed since 1974 and came as close as they ever got to the brass ring of stardom in 1986 with a song called “Tuff Enuff” [sic] that was featured in a movie called Gung Ho. Their Wikipedia page tells a rather sad tale of record contracts signed and then canceled as the band’s personnel changed over the years. The original lineup included Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s older brother, on guitar, but last night’s lineup was a simple four-piece: vocal, guitar, electric bass, drums. I’ve often judged Live at the Belly Up episodes by the number of songs the band crowds into their one-hour (less intro, outro and the inevitable interstitial interview segments) time slot. That would have been deceptive with The Fabulous Thunderbirds because for the first half of the show they played six concise, tightly arranged songs – “Wrap It Up,” “Don’t Make No Sense” (which they played in a zydeco rhythm that was a nice contrast to the straight-ahead blues of the rest of their program), “Early in the Morning,” “I’m a Good Man,” “Tear It Up,” and a cover of Slim Harpo’s “Baby, Scratch My Back.” Then they segued from “Scratch My Back” into an extended instrumental jam that lasted 10 minutes and totally defeated the Live at the Belly Up chyron writers. After that the band brought up two guest artists, guitarists Lena Chavez and Joey Delgado, for “Wait On Time” and “Give Me All Your Lovin’,” before closing with “Tuff Enuff.”

The Fabulous Thunderbirds are a great blues band, though I got tired of the foghorn vocals of their leader (and the only member who’s been with the band throughout), Kim Wilson. Indeed, when he was bringing out two guests, one of them a woman, I was hoping one of them would sing because I would have liked the respite from Wilson’s strong but monochromatic voice. He’s the sort of singer for whom the term “blues shouter” was coined, and one of the virtues of that 10-minute instrumental jam was that instead of having to endure more of Wilson’s voice, we got to hear him play harmonica, at which he’s great. The piece interpolated a bit of “You Are My Sunshine,” but otherwise it was your typical blues jam. I also quite liked Lena Chavez; she’s a heavy-set Latina and her playing is quite lyrical and a welcome rest from the fireworks of the other two guitarists, including the Thunderbirds’ regular member as well as Joey Delgado. (I haven’t been able to find the names of the other members of the current Fabulous Thunderbirds online; their Wikipedia page lists a lineup that doesn’t match the one that played on Live at the Belly Up.) I suspect I’d have liked The Fabulous Thunderbirds better if I hadn’t just interviewed neo-blues musician Al Basile for Fanfare magazine and heard his most recent CD, Blues in Hand. It helps that Basile has a more flexible voice that Wilson (even though it’s no great shakes in terms of sheer beauty; he cites Louis Armstrong as his model both instrumetally and vocally) and also that instead of harmonica or guitar, Basile plays cornet – and plays it quite lyrically in the manner of a turn-of-the-last-century band player. It also helps that Basile is a much more inventive songwriter who’s able to deploy the standard blues clichés in fresh and original ways, whereas Kim Wilson just churns out common blues lines and strings them into songs.

I don’t want to make The Fabulous Thunderbirds sound worse than they are; I quite enjoyed their music for what it was, and I loved Wilson’s account of how he wrote “Tuff Enuff” on a plane making the half-hour flight from Dallas to Austin, Texas (did I mention that he’s Texan?). He scribbled out the lyrics on an air sickness bag, which reminded me of Art Blakey’s account during a 1954 live performance of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” that “I was there when Dizzy wrote that song – in Texas, on the bottom of a garbage can.” It’s just that I couldn’t help but wonder what they would have sounded like with a more flexible, more emotionally varied singer.