Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir (BYU Broadcasting, GBH, Intellectual Reserve, PBS, aired December 15, 2025)

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

Last night (Monday, December 15) I put on a couple of TV shows on PBS and my husband Charles and I watched them together, though he had to bail on one of them a half-hour before the end because he got an emergency phone call from his church pastor. (Actually, it wasn’t that big an emergency; she just wanted to vent.) The first was formally titled Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir. The choir in question was formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and so were its Christmas specials, which frequently featured major guest stars like opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa. In 2024 they abbreviated the name of their show to Joy with the Tabernacle Choir, and they followed the same practice this year even though the Mormon connections were pretty evident: the show’s production was credited to the media department of Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormon Church’s official name, through a front company called “Intellectual Reserve, Inc.” Previous episodes of this show ran for an hour, but this one went an hour and a half and featured some rather emphatically phrased renditions of both familiar and not-so-familiar Christmas carols. Some were played instrumentally, some sung by the choir, and some were solos featuring Broadway star Ruthie Ann Miles (b. 1983). Miles briefly mentioned her background as a church singer in her teens; her mother was music director of a church in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and Ruthie got pressed into service whenever they needed a spare soloist for the church.

Her Wikipedia page indicates a far more Dickensian childhood than the one that got mentioned last night; though she was born in Arizona, her mother was Korean, Esther Wong, and moved them first to Korea and then to Hawai’i, where Ruthie recalled having to train herself to lose her Korean accent. She played Christmas Eve in Avenue Q, Imelda Marcos in Here Lies Love, and Lady Thiang (King Mongkut’s first wife) in the 2015 Broadway revival of The King and I. Then in 2018 Miles was involved in an accident that killed her daughter and unborn child; she and her husband were crossing a New York street when they were run over by a car. Miles returned to the stage in August 2018, five months after the accident, and she and her husband, Jonathan Blumenstein (his last name is German for “flower rock”), eventually had another daughter whom they appropriately named Hope Elizabeth. For the first half of the concert it was mainly just music, with Miles singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and a medley of “Spirit of the Season” and “If You Just Believe” from The Polar Express (a 2004 animated film based on a 1985 children’s novel). The other selections were “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” “’Twas Midnight in the Stable,” “Welcome Christmas Morning,” and an odd selection called “Gamelan” by Murray Schaefer in which, by singing a cappella without words, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir attempted to duplicate the sound of a Balinese or Javanese gamelan ensemble. Then the orchestra re-entered and the choir started singing words again for “Sing We Now, O Child of Wonder,” though since there was no chyron it was probably just a tag for “Gamelan.”

After that, a pretty standard chorus-and-orchestra rendition of “Joy to the World,” and Ruthie Ann Miles’s The Polar Express medley, came one of the most intriguing bits of the program: a medley of three pieces called “Alleluia.” First was one by Johann Sebastian Bach based on the infamous “Air on the ‘G’ String” from the Orchestral Suite No. 3; then was a surprisingly advanced (musically) “Alleluia” from Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) that verged on 12-tone technique and had an engaging celesta solo part that was not at all what you usually think of for that instrument; and last was the all-too-familiar “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s oratorio The Messiah. Next came a real surprise: a jazz version of the carol “Patapan,” also known as “When You Hear the Pipes and Drums,” with an organist contributing jazz licks along with a jazz-style pianist, bassist, and drummer. After that came the expected dramatic portions of the evening performed by African-American actor Dennis Haysbert. One was a tribute to an unusual civic leader from Kenya named Dr. Charles Mulli. He was abandoned by his parents at age six when they fled his native village with their younger children. After unsuccessfully trying to find a relative who would take him in, he spent the next 10 years homeless until he finally emigrated to Nairobi in search of a job. Mulli found one with a woman who hired him at first as a houseboy, then promoted him to supervise her field workers until he was ultimately running her plantation.

He gradually built a fortune selling automobile parts and became a multimillionaire until one day, in 1989, he turned down some street children who were begging for money and/or food. When he returned from work, Mulli found that the kids had stolen his car. He took this as a sign that his life until then had been meaningless and he had a moral obligation to help suffering children who were in the same position he’d been in years before as a homeless child himself. So he went home and told his wife that he was selling all his businesses and devoting the money to turning their home into an orphanage for street kids. Needless to say, she wasn’t thrilled about that and their own children were less than happy with their rambunctious foster siblings, but eventually Mulli’s combination of grit, determination, and business savvy led him to build a chain of orphanages across Kenya. Haysbert’s account of Mulli’s story included a Tabernacle Choir rendition of “Silent Night” and ended with an instrumental postlude whose title I missed. Afterwards Haysbert narrated the familiar Nativity story and the concert closed with Ruthie Ann Miles, the chorus, and orchestra doing “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” a French carol better known as “Angels We Have Heard on High.” (I suspect the difference is simply a variant translation of the original French.) Though the musical performances got a bit too loud and aggressive at times, it was nonetheless a stunning commemoration of the holiday season. I was a bit depressed at the overall whiteness of the performing forces – aside from the half-Asian Miles, there were a couple of Asian-looking choir singers but no discernible Blacks or Latinos (and there weren’t that many people of color in the audience, either! I just re-read my post about the 2024 telecast and was surprised that that one’s choir had been a lot more racially mixed than this one’s) – but overall it was a nice celebration of Christmas and better than I’d expected from these auspices.

The Jungle Book (Alexander Korda Films, United Artists, 1942)

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

Last night shortly after 9:15 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 1942 film The Jungle Book, produced by Alexander Korda, directed by Zoltan Korda, with production design by Vincent Korda. (Yes, they were brothers.) I’d picked up a public-domain copy of The Jungle Book the last time I stopped into the Mission Hills Library along with three other DVD’s: the 1949 Western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne; Verdi’s opera Rigoletto with Luciano Pavarotti, Edita Gruberova, and Ingvar Wixell, directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and conducted by Riccardo Chailly from 1983; and a 1983 “Gala Concert” from Sydney, Australia with Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, and Richard Bonynge conducting. I rattled off all four of those for Charles and it seemed like The Jungle Book was the one that most excited him even though we’d seen it before together. It didn’t take Charles long to notice how badly faded the colors were in the print (that’s a common failing of public-domain films that were originally in color; I remember a testy exchange on the old imdb.com bulletin boards about the 1939 film The Little Princess, Shirley Temple’s first color film; it had slipped into the public domain and some people on the bulletin board had suggested it had been colorized, which prompted a comment from Sybil Jason, who as a child actress had been in the film with Temple and said it had been in color originally). Ironically, I just watched the original trailer which is linked to on The Jungle Book’s imdb.com page and its colors were far brighter and more vibrant than the ones in the actual movie, at least in the print we saw. I’ve had occasion to mention the 1942 The Jungle Book in connection with some of my movie soundtrack reviews for Fanfare because it’s the first film for which an original soundtrack album was issued. Record companies had issued music from films before that, but they’d insisted in re-recording it in their own studios with their own equipment. In 1942 Capitol Records was a young, struggling company co-owned by singer Johnny Mercer, and one of their ideas was to license an original soundtrack, transfer it to disc masters, and issue it on records as an album (back when an “album” meant literally that: a batch of 78 rpm records bound together in sleeves like a photo album). One could hear why The Jungle Book was chosen for this honor because Milkós Rósza’s score for it is incredible: warm, coloristic, innovative and fascinating listening even on its own without the film.

As far as the actual movie was concerned, the last time I’d watched it I’d found it utterly magical; this time around I found it harder going. It’s based on Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories, or at least four of them – “Mowgli's Brothers,” “How Fear Came,” “Tiger! Tiger!,” and “The King's Ankus" – which screenwriter Laurence Stallings (best known for his 1920’s play about World War I, What Price Glory?, and seemingly an odd choice for a children’s fantasy about India) blended together into a reasonably coherent narrative. The star was Sabu, playing Mowgli, who when he was a child lost his father to the man-eating tiger Shere Khan. Mowgli happened to run off from his mother just as his dad was becoming Shere Khan’s dinner, and he was taken in by a wolf pack and, like Romulus and Remus, raised by them. As the film starts (it’s actually narrated as a flashback by Joseph Calleia as an old Indian beggar entertaining Anglo tourists) Mowgli has just returned to his native village, to the joy of his mother Mahala (Patricia O’Rourke). He falls in love with a village girl, Messua (Rosemary DeCamp), but her father, trader Buldeo (Joseph Calleia), takes an instant dislike to Mowgli. Mowgli intimidates Buldeo into giving him a “tooth” – actually a knife – with which to hunt and kill Shere Khan. Much is made of the “law of the jungle,” and in particular its prohibition against killing anything unless you’re doing it for survival or food. There’s a great scene in which Mowgli sees a bear-skin rug and laments that the bear, whom he knew, got killed for so pointless a reason as to be turned into a carpet. Mowgli and Messua set off into the jungle in search for Shere Khan, and they fall down a hole in front of a gigantic palace built by a long-extinct human tribe which assembled major riches. (The movie was shot at a Southern California resort named “Sherwood Forest,” and I think the giant palace was the same building the Halperin brothers used as a Cambodian temple in their 1936 film Revolt of the Zombies.) Messua takes home one coin after she’s confronted by Kaa the snake (voiced by Mel “Bugs Bunny” Blanc), who explains that he’s old and his venom has been exhausted but the items in the treasure, especially an ornament with a ruby inside, are cursed and will kill anyone who tries to remove them. Mowgli finally confronts and kills Shere Khan with one-third of the film’s 108-minute running time left to go. The rest is taken up by an all too human intrigue as Messua’s dad Buldeo (ya remember Messua’s dad Buldeo?) catches her with the gold coin. Buldeo and his associates “The Barber” (John Qualen) and “The Pandit” (Frank Puglia), hatch a plot to go to the abandoned city and grab the treasure, but in the end they set the city and the surrounding jungle on fire while Mowgli, disgusted by the greed-driven ways of humanity, returns to the jungle and his animal friends.

The Jungle Book is a visually stunning entertainment – even in the dreadfully faded print we were watching Lee Garmes’s and W. Howard Greene’s cinematography remains beautiful – but it’s also a story that treads on the thin edge of silliness and occasionally goes over. Charles lamented that precisely because the film is in the public domain, it’s unlikely to be the subject of the restoration job it desperately needs. At least Sabu is cute in the male lead (and he was the only card-carrying Indian in the cast, though when his British and American film career faded and he tried to get parts in Bollywood he was refused a work permit from the Indian government because he was a naturalized U.S. citizen), though like Shirley Temple he lost his career when he grew older and could no longer credibly play pre-pubescent precociousness. I’ve seen various versions of Sabu’s first name – some sources call him Sabu Dastagir and some call him Selar Sheikh Sabu – but what is known is he got discovered for films by the great documentarian Robert Flaherty, who in 1936 went to India to make Elephant Boy (another Kipling adaptation, from Toomai of the Elephants), also with Alexander Korda as producer. Sabu wowed Korda, who put him under contract, took him to London, hired tutors to improve his English (his performance in Elephant Boy is notable for the vast difference in his English skills between the footage Flaherty shot in India and the retakes Zoltan Korda directed in Britain), put him in another film called The Drum (Drums in the U.S.), and then cast him in the title role of a 1940 film, The Thief of Baghdad (a much better movie than the Douglas Fairbanks silent of which it was nominally a remake). Unfortunately, while Korda was shooting The Thief of Baghdad World War II started, and when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister he had the entire British film industry shut down because it was using up resources important to the war effort. So Korda took his cast, crew, and half-completed film to Hollywood, finished it there, and looked for another property which became The Jungle Book.

Killer's Kiss (Minotaur Productions, United Artists, 1955)

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

Last night (Saturday, December 13) I watched four films in a row – three features and a short – on Turner Classic Movies. The first two, Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955) and Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall (1956), were presented as one of the channel’s double bills co-introduced by regular host Ben Mankiewicz and Rosie Perez, actress and dancer who was invited because she frequents boxing matches so often she’s been referred to as the “Queen of Boxing” and both movies were about boxers. Killer’s Kiss was Kubrick’s second film, and like his first, Fear and Desire (1952), was produced on the proverbial shoestring. Most of the money came from Bronx pharmacist Morris Bousel, who gets co-producer credit with Kubrick, and it was largely shot on location in New York City. It’s definitely a film noir and its romantic leads are Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a burned-out boxer whose best days in the ring are behind him even though he’s just 29 years old, and dance-hall hostess Gloria Price (Irene Kane). Ironically, the actor who receives top billing is Frank Silvera, playing gangster Vince Rapallo, who owns the dance hall where Gloria works and is infatuated with her. The story is a simple one: Davey has just lost his latest bout with a fighter named Kid Rodriguez when he returns to his ratty Manhattan apartment and sees Gloria from her window in the building next door. (One wonders if Kubrick and his co-writer, Howard Sackler, were influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, released just one year before Killer’s Kiss was shot.) Davey has already accepted his fate and plans to move back to Seattle, where his aunt and uncle raised him, and work on their horse ranch. (This evokes John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, in which the character played by Sterling Hayden desperately wants to return home to the horse ranch where he grew up, and just barely makes it before he dies of the wounds he got in a shoot-out. Later Hayden would work for Kubrick in The Killing, in a role strongly similar to the one he played in The Asphalt Jungle, and in Dr. Strangelove.)

Alas, when he hears Gloria scream from her window, he spies Rapallo attempting to rape her, and Rapallo is angry and vows revenge. Rapallo has two of his henchmen kill Davey’s manager and frame him for the crime, distracting Davey with two other men, disguised as Shriners, who steal Davey’s scarf and force him to chase after them to retrieve it. There’s a chase scene across New York rooftops during which both Rapallo and Davey injure themselves (apparently Frank Silvera and Jamie Smith both hurt themselves for real) before the two men finally confront each other in a mannequin factory, where they attempt to beat each other to death with the mannequins. Ultimately the police arrive and decide that Davey killed Rapallo in self-defense, exonerate him for the murder of his manager, and send him on his way to Seattle. In a happy ending the distributors, United Artists (who gave Kubrick $10,000 in completion money), insisted on, Gloria meets him at the Pennsylvania Station (the fabled locale mentioned in the song “Chattanooga Choo Choo” which was demolished in 1963) and goes to Seattle with him just after Davey, in a typical voice-over film noir narration, laments over what a fool he was to let a woman he’d known for only two days so totally upend his life. There’s also an odd scene in which ballerina Ruth Sobotka, then Mrs. Stanley Kubrick, dances a quite elaborate scene while Gloria narrates a dialogue flashback. Sobotka is playing Iris, Gloria’s late older sister, who turned her back on a promising ballet career to marry a rich man who demanded she retire. She did so because their father had become catastrophically ill and needed expensive medical care, and when dad finally died two years later, Iris, lamenting the loss of her career, committed suicide. What’s most interesting about Killer’s Kiss is the intimations of later Kubrick films: there’s a long dream sequence of Davey careening through the streets of New York, shot in negative film, that evokes the long traveling shot of Jack Nicholson on his way to the New England hotel that opens The Shining, while the final scene in the mannequin factory couldn’t help but remind me of the scene in A Clockwork Orange in which Alex (Malcolm McDowell) kills the woman he’s just raped by beating her with a phallic statue in her home.

The film was well received enough that United Artists continued working with Kubrick on his next film, The Killing, also a film noir but with, if not A-list, at least A-minus-list actors (Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr.). Variety gave it a mixed but generally positive review at or around the time of the original release (there’s an intimation that the anonymous reviewer had seen at least The Killing by this time, for s/he refers to Killer’s Kiss as “a warmup for Kubrick’s talents”): “Ex-Look photographer Stanley Kubrick turned out Killer's Kiss on the proverbial shoestring. Kiss was more than a warm-up for Kubrick's talents, for not only did he co-produce but he directed, photographed and edited the venture from his own screenplay and original story [originally written by Howard Sackler]. … Kubrick's low-key lensing occasionally catches the flavor of the seamy side of Gotham life. His scenes of tawdry Broadway, gloomy tenements and grotesque brick-and-stone structures that make up Manhattan's downtown eastside loft district help offset the script's deficiencies.” Kubrick was his own cinematographer, and some of the striking noir images he got have become familiar through TCM’s recycling of them on their introductions. Alas, Killer’s Kiss is not terribly well acted; Frank Silvera is convincing in his villain’s role but both Jamie Smith and Irene Kane (who later reverted to her original name, Chris Chase, and became a writer) deliver their lines in monotones that suggest they’ve just started acting classes. Part of the nervous delivery may be due to Kubrick’s decision to have all the dialogue post-recorded, as he had on Fear and Desire, Originally he was going to do conventional live on-the-set recording, but he decided the mikes were getting in the way of his visuals, so he banished them and shot the whole thing silent with sound added later. (Kubrick was never a big one for extended dialogue scenes. On his greatest film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, he used dialogue for only 42 minutes of the 127-minute running time.)

The Harder They Fall (Columbia, 1956)

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

Turner Classic Movies’ second boxing movie on their double-bill Saturday, December 13 was The Harder They Fall, made by Columbia Pictures in 1956 and based on an anti-boxing novel Budd Schulberg had published in 1947. Schulberg had hoped to get the assignment to write the script, too, but producer Philip Yordan pulled rank on him and wrote it himself. He also made one dramatic change in the material: originally the character of Eddie Willis (Humphrey Bogart in his final film) ends it by writing an article that begins, “Boxing must be outlawed in the United States, even if it takes an act of Congress to do it.” In the film as it stands now the final line he types is, “The boxing business must rid itself of the evil influence of racketeers and corrupt managers, even if it takes an act of Congress to do it.” The change was made at Budd Schulberg’s insistence, since in his 1971 book Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali he said he’d only meant to call for the reform of boxing, not its abolition altogether. The Harder They Fall, directed by Val Lewton veteran Mark Robson (and it shows in a scene in which gangsters corner a fighter who refused to take a dive when he’d been paid to in a gym shower and beat him to death, and Robson depicts it with a scene of bloody water trickling out of the shower, copped from Lewton’s and Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man), deals with Eddie Willis, a long-term sportswriter who lost his regular column when the New York newspaper he wrote for went out of business. He’s contacted by gangster Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) to do P.R. for a scam Benko has cooked up: he’s signed a deal with Argentinian boxer Toro Moreno (Mike Lane) who looks formidable – he weighs 278 pounds, 60 to 70 pounds more than a typical heavyweight – but has, as Willis put it after he sees him with his African-American sparring partner George (played by real-life boxer Jersey Joe Walcott), “a powder-puff punch and a glass jaw.”

Benko and his corrupt henchmen set up a series of fixed fights in which Toro will win by knockouts and build up a reputation as a contender for the heavyweight championship. Despite the misgivings of his wife Beth (Jan Sterling, five years after her incandescent performance as the faithless femme fatale in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Ace in the Hole; alas, she’s largely wasted her in her typical good-wife role) and his old friend Art Leavitt (Harold J. Stone), a TV sportscaster who catches on that Toro’s first fight was fixed, Willis takes on the job. Meanwhile, the heavyweight championship for which Toro is being promoted changes hands as contender Buddy Brannen (another real-life boxer, Max Baer) defeats reigning champion Gus Dundee (Pat Comiskey) and leaves Dundee with a concussion. In Toro’s next fight with Dundee, as a warmup for his championship bout with Brannen, Dundee dies from his previous injuries and Toro is convinced that he killed him. Homesick, bereft of his original manager Luis Agrandi (Carlos Montalbán) whom Benko sent away, and upset by a note he’s received from his parish priest back in Argentina that his father is dying, Toro wants to quit the ring and return home to be with his sick father. But with the championship fight with Brannen already arranged, Benko and his gang are determined not to let Toro leave the country and bail out on his big bout. First they have five people corner him with chains and try to beat the shit out of him – Toro’s helplessness in the face of these thugs, as well as the scene in which he was first introduced and he clumsily bumped into an overhead light fixture, tell us all we need to know about his utter haplessness as a fighter – and then Willis corners him in a church (whose pastor is played by legendary voice actor Paul Frees) and talks him into going ahead with the Brannen fight because there’ll be a major pay envelope waiting for him after it.

Meantime Brannen has formed a personal grudge against Toro over the claims that it was he, not Toro, who inflicted the fatal blows against Dundee. Benko’s men have told Brannen to go easy on Toro for six rounds to make it look competitive, but the furious Brannen refuses and opens up on Toro almost from the get-go and totally humiliates him. Toro ends up in a hospital with his jaw badly fractured and wired shut, which doesn’t stop Benko from selling Toro’s contract to an equally corrupt manager, Jim Weyerhause (Edward Andrews), for $75,000. Weyerhause figures he can make his money back touring the hapless Toro in the counties in which he won his fixed fights and allowing the local boys to clobber him, but in the meantime Willis determines (in the classic arc of a Bogart character who lost his ideals in the backstory but regained them in the finale) to help Toro get out of the country as soon as he’s well enough to travel. When Willis goes to Benko to get his and Toro’s shares of his earnings, he gets an envelope containing $26,000 but is told that after all the deductions for expenses, all Toro has coming to him is $49.07. Willis gives Toro his own share of the proceeds and then announces his intention to Benko to write a series of articles exposing the corruption of the fight game. Benko threatens him but then realizes that a man who’d give away $26,000 out of a sense of righteousness is someone who can’t be corrupted, bribed, or intimidated.

The Harder They Fall was a good movie for Humphrey Bogart to go out on; it’s tough, well-made, gives Bogart one last change to portray nobility regained, and the reported real-life antagonism between him and Steiger adds verisimilitude to the story. Bogart made no particular secret of his distaste for the Method and the actors who practiced it – he referred to it as the “scratch-your-ass-and-mumble school” – and in this movie we see Steiger throwing himself into his role with all his Method affectations and Bogart taking the acting honors with his simple, direct Old Hollywood professionalism. One aspect of this film that irritated me on previous go-rounds was the cheesy “Latin” theme composer Hugo Friedhofer inflicted on us every time Toro’s tour bus is shown on screen, though most of the music is actually quite good even though it’s a functional rather than an expansive score: one which works in the context of the film even though it doesn’t generate great music on its own. Robson’s direction and Burnett Guffey’s cinematography are good enough to serve their purposes – this is an exposé, not a film noir, though the basic story had potentials for noir atmospherics that weren’t realized or even attempted (notably in the scene in which Willis is on the phone to his wife Beth and a woman sneaks into his hotel room and puts her hand on the phone cord, thereby hanging up the call; we momentarily believe that Willis is going extra-relational on Beth, but that’s about the farthest thing from his mind at the moment) – and for some reason, even though he was about to be diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him in early 1957, Bogart actually looks healthier here than he had in Beat the Devil two years earlier.

The Lady and the Lug (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1940)

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

Oddly, after The Harder They Come on Saturday, December 13 TCM showed a 20-minute short called The Lady and the Lug (1940) that was also about the boxing game and in particular about a hapless would-be fighter who’s totally hopeless in the ring. The Lady and the Lug was a vehicle for the celebrated party hostess Elsa Maxwell, who plays herself. Her nephew Doug Abbott (future TV Superman George Reeves) has just won, in a poker game, the management contract of would-be boxer Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom (also playing himself). Maxwell hits on the idea of staging a boxing exhibition at her latest benefit for the Milk Fund (a common charity in the 1930’s which existed to raise money for babies from poor parents to have access to milk; it’s still around, by the way, albeit under various names) between Rosenbloom and championship contender “One-Punch” McGurk (Frank Hagney). Maxwell trains with Rosenbloom and paces him during his running workouts, which he keeps trying to cut short because he gets too tired, and when Rosenbloom finds out whom he’s going to be fighting in the big Milk Fund bout he wants to bail, At this point we’re probably wondering why Maxwell doesn’t put her nephew in the ring instead – “He is from Krypton, after all!” I couldn’t resist joking to myself – but instead she talks Rosenbloom into getting into the ring after all. Only McGurk decides to fight dirty, so Maxwell throws off her society duds, gets into the ring herself, and knocks out the would-be champ. Directed by Warners’ “B”-meister William McGann from a committee-written script (Owen Crump and Jack Henley, “original” story; Charles R. Marion and Arthur V. Jones, screenplay), The Lady and the Lug is a charming little curio that, among other things, showed Warners’ cluelessness about what to do with George Reeves. He signed with the studio around the same time they picked up another tall, lanky, barely coordinated young actor named Ronald Reagan, who of course went on to even bigger and arguably better things than George Reeves did!

Cash on Demand (Hammer Films, Woodpecker Productions, British Lion, Columbia, 1961)

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

Eventually my husband Charles returned from work last night (Saturday, December 13) an hour earlier than expected and therefore he got to watch with me the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” screening of a really quirky 1961 crime thriller from Hammer Films, Cash on Demand. Directed by Quentin Lawrence from a script by David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer from a play by Jacques Gillies, Cash on Demand came about after one of Hammer’s biggest stars, Peter Cushing, served notice on the studio that he was tired of rehashing Universal’s big monster properties and wanted something else. Cushing and André Morell, a key supporting player in this one, had already done an adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959 (Cushing thus became the first actor to play Holmes on screen since Basil Rathbone hung up the deerstalker after his last Holmes film, Dressed to Kill, 13 years earlier). For this one Cushing was cast as Harry Fordyce, imperious manager of the bank in Haversham, Buckinghamshire, southern England, and Morell as Col. Gore Hepburn, who shows up claiming to be an examiner for an insurance company but is really a crook determined to rob the Haversham Bank of 90,000 pounds without doing anything as crude as sticking up the place or blowing out its safes. Gore Hepburn puts Fordyce and his clerk, Pearson (Richard Vernon), through the wringer on this one, winning Fordyce’s cooperation by telling him his gang are in his home and have wired electrodes around his wife to immobilize her forever if he gets out of line. Gore Hepburn gets Pearson to take his suitcases out of his car (an Aston-Martin, whose poshness becomes a major running gag in the story), though there’s a glitch in the plan when he finds that Pearson doesn’t drive (like me!) and therefore someone else will have to move the car from the 20-minute zone it’s parked in to the bank’s own lot.

All this takes place on Christmas Eve and a snowstorm suddenly starts (“Cue the corn flakes!” I joked; ground-up and white-painted corn flakes were a common movie substitute for snow in the early days) and inconveniences the bell-ringing Santa Claus impersonator who’s doing his thing just outside the bank. Pearson and a younger bank staff member have already called the insurance company – the real one – and learned that the real “Gore Hepburn” is an impostor. Fordyce pleads with them to cancel the call to the police in fear for his family, but the cops show up anyway, recognize Gore Hepburn as a well-known crook, and arrest him. It turns out that Fordyce’s wife and child (whom we never see, though we briefly hear their voices on the soundtrack and they’re visibly present through framed photos on Fordyce’s desk) were in no danger after all. Gore Hepburn hired a voice impersonator to record “their” voices on tape and play it over the phone to Fordyce to fool him. For a while I thought where this was going was that the cops would arrest Fordyce as Gore Hepburn’s “inside man” and he’d be unable to convince them that he was only helping rob his own bank under duress, but in the end they’re convinced by his story and the experience leads Fordyce to conclude that he’s been way too much of a martinet boss and he should be more collegial and forgiving towards his staff. This film is a particular favorite of Eddie Muller’s, who regards it as a modern-day reworking of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with Fordyce as Scrooge and Gore Hepburn as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Both Charles and I found the parallel too forced to be believable, but Muller has taken a major role in rehabilitating this film’s reputation, including raising money for a full restoration. Like a lot of other Hammers, the film lost a considerable amount of running time (it got 22 minutes shorter) between its British release in 1961 and its U.S. debut a year later. Charles was also surprised it was in black-and-white instead of Hammer’s usual Gorycolor, and I couldn’t help but think when Gore Hepburn mentioned having connected Mrs. Fordyce to “electrodes” that Peter Cushing was probably thinking, “Oh, here we go again.” (Actually, in The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer’s first Frankenstein film, Peter Cushing created his Monster in a giant aquarium – a prop that was reused for The Rocky Horror Picture Show – instead of electrodes connected to lightning rods or kites the way Colin Clive had in James Whale’s Frankenstein films.) Cash on Demand is a quirky little thriller, not at all film noir but a nice little exercise in suspense that probably gave Peter Cushing the change of pace he was hoping for and was a nice little audience-pleaser.

I Want My '80's! (Springfield Brothers, Imaggination, Inc., 2025)

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

After the 1961 Hammer movie Cash on Demand was over on Turner Classic Movies Saturday, December 13 I switched over to KPBS for a pledge-break special called I Want My ’80’s! which I figured my husband Charles would be interested in because he’s a much bigger fan of 1980’s pop music than I am. (That’s the nine-year generation gap between us again; I was born in 1953, he in 1962, and therefore I have living memories of the 1960’s and its music that Charles doesn’t. Once we were talking about Janis Joplin, of whom I have living memories even though I never got to see her live. Charles said, “To me, Janis Joplin has always been dead.”) I Want My ’80’s! turned out to be a concert presentation in which Rick Springfield was the headliner and Wang Chung and John Waite were basically his opening acts. Springfield got six songs during the show, which ran for an hour and a half though only about 45 to 50 minutes were actual performance, and Wang Chung and John Waite got three songs each. I’d never heard of John Waite before, actually – if I’d heard the name back then I’d probably have assumed it meant either John Hiatt or Tom Waits – but he presented himself as a solid singer-songwriter whose three songs, “Change,” “When I See You Smile,” and “Missing You,” were powerful if unexceptional pieces of pop-rock. I had heard of Wang Chung before and I had at least one of their CD’s, the soundtrack album for William Friedkin’s 1985 Los Angeles-set thriller To Live and Die in L.A. I got that after I’d read about it in Fanfare magazine because in the 1980’s Royal S. Brown was doing a regular column about film music and that was one of the albums he was obliged to review. He joked in his article that he had originally thought “Wang Chung” was a single Chinese or Asian-descended musician instead of the nom de groupe of two young Britishers, Jack Hues (true name: Jeremy Ryder) and Nick Feldman. Actually there was a third group member, Darren Costin, who left after their second album. According to their Wikipedia page their name means “Yellow Bell” in Chinese and is also the first note on the Chinese musical scale. Royal S. Brown also joked that his younger son had threatened him with bodily harm if he didn’t like the Wang Chung To Live and Die in L.A. album. Fortunately for him, he did. The CD was originally an LP release which contained four vocal tracks on side one and four instrumentals used as soundtrack cues in the movie on side two.

The three songs Wang Chung did on I Want My ’80’s! were “Dance Hall Days,” “Let’s Go,” and “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” which famously incorporated the group’s name into the lyric: the chorus went, “Everybody have fun tonight. Everybody Wang Chung tonight.” (The band’s name was originally Huang Chung, but when they signed with Geffen Records, David Geffen suggested they change the spelling to “Wang Chung” to make it easier for Westerners to pronounce.) I’m not sure which Wang Chunger was which, but one of them had considerably shorter hair and was playing a normal guitar while the other had longer, bushier hair and was playing one of those oddball guitars with a quadrilateral body and no visible tuning pegs. (I wonder how he keeps it in tune.) Also the longer-haired Wang Chungster was wearing a black T-shirt which had writing on it; it was too bunched up on his body to make the writing totally legible but it appeared to say “Wang Chung Are Fucking Metal!!!,” with the “a” in “metal” replaced with the anarchist symbol. Charles told me that one of them was classically trained, and I’m guessing it was the short-haired one because his voice had weathered the years considerably better than his partner’s. After three songs by Wang Chung and three by John Waite, Rick Springfield came on and turned out to be surprisingly well preserved, both physically and vocally. No, he’s not the same cutie he was in the early 1980’s when he was at the peak of his fame, but he looks quite good and without the careworn lines that had started to afflict Mick Jagger’s face at a comparable age. He’s also a quite good guitar player and a capable singer whose voice was almost as good as it was in the 1980’s. Charles said he wondered what Rick Springfield’s voice would have sounded like “in the day” without the benefit of studio production, and as luck would have it I had a chance to do a comparison.

On July 5, 1981 I had recorded a TV broadcast (through a direct connection, though I can’t remember whether I was recording off a TV itself or off a radio station that was doing a simulcast) of an outdoor concert in Long Beach with The Beach Boys as the headliners and Rick Springfield, Three Dog Night, and Pablo Cruise as their opening acts. I had dubbed my original cassette to CD and dug it out to play for Charles, and he agreed with me that the 1981 Rick Springfield and the 2025 Rick Springfield were surprisingly close in timbre and overall pitch control. Springfield’s songs were “Affair of the Heart,” “World Starts Turning,” “State of the Heart,” “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” “Love Somebody,” and his star-making hit, “Jessie’s Girl.” (The big line of that song was, “I wish that I had Jessie’s girl,” and of course being me I did a Gay rewrite: “I wish that I was Jessie’s girl.” Later Charles told me that he, like I, had been perplexed at the spelling of the name “Jessie,” which is usually the woman’s version. Charles joked last night that it was about a man trying to break up a Lesbian couple!) For “Affair of the Heart” Springfield wore a spectacular jacket with a sunburst pattern printed on the front. For the next four songs he took off the jacket and performed in a plain black T-shirt, and for “Jessie’s Girl” – which he played in a 10-minute version that had at least as many false endings as Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” – he took his shirt off completely and played topless. Given that he’s 75 years old (he was born August 23, 1949 in Sydney, Australia and the show was taped as part of a multi-city tour that also featured Paul Young and John Cafferty), he’s quite impressively preserved (certainly far better than I am!), and his voice is also solidly preserved and in good shape for the driving power-pop that is his stock in trade musically. Charles said he remembered watching, and considerably disliking, the 1984 movie Hard to Hold, in which Springfield played a rock star who falls in love with a woman psychiatrist whose only musical interests are in classical. He said he’d endured the movie and later he found that his sister Taun, who’d seen it separately, actually walked out on it. And this was supposed to be the big stroke for his acting career that would get him out of the General Hospital soap-opera ghetto, which it didn’t. But it was still nice to hear Rick Springfield again and notice how good he still is, even though he’s probably suffered under the long-term comparisons between him and the far more creative and talented Bruce Springsteen based only on the similarity between their names!