The Christine Jorgensen Story (Edward Small Productions, EdProd Pictures, United Artists, 1970)

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

Last night (Monday, November 24), as part of a month-long salute on Turner Classic Movies about Trans images in film, TCM showed the rather strange and fascinating 1970 film The Christine Jorgensen Story. Christine Jorgensen (played in the movie as a boy by Trent Lehman and as an adult by John Hansen) was born George Jorgensen, Jr. in the Bronx, New York City. His father, George William Jorgensen (John W. Himes), was a construction worker and expected George, Jr. to follow in his footsteps, especially since he and his wife Florence (Ellen Clark) had already had a daughter, Dolly (Pamelyn Ferden as a child, Lynn Harper as an adult), and he was looking forward to a son. Alas, as a boy young George, Jr. gravitated to playing with his sister’s dolls and, in one flashback scene, wearing one of his sister’s dresses and putting on their mother’s lipstick (wretchedly). When he builds a crooked toy building with his Erector set (I remember Erector sets from my own childhood; they were essentially the Legos of their time) and the other guests at his family’s Christmas party make fun of it, he smashes it to smithereens. When he tries to play football with the other local boys – something he’s drafted to do when he’d rather play jump-rope with the girls – he catches the ball but then immediately drops it, and the boys bully him and call him “Georgette.” When George, Jr. is drafted into the Army during World War II – again, something he was drafted for – he washes out of basic training and is told he’ll fight his war stateside in offices. There’s also a flashback scene late in the movie (this film has more flashbacks than anything since Citizen Kane) in which George and his army buddies go out to a whorehouse, only George is unable to perform sexually with Angela (Sondra Scott), the prostitute he draws (who’s so sleazy she’s a rotten advertisement for heterosexuality anyway),and as he apologizes to her she takes his failure as a personal and professional insult. (This scene reminded me of a story I heard from a Gay man who’d been in the Navy and had been stationed in the Philippines when he got in a similar challenge from his sailor buddies. But the way he told his story, he spent the requisite amount of time with his hooker without doing anything, and she was grateful for the momentary rest.)

After the war George gets a job as a fashion photographer for advertising agencies and he turns out to be quite good at it, only his job ends abruptly on a beachfront shoot when one of the female models, Loretta (Elaine Joyce), questions his masculinity. George has already started to pack his bags and head back to New York when his boss, Jess Warner (Rod McCary), intervenes and tries to talk him into staying. Alas, he does much more than that; though we’ve previously seen him with a woman, his overtures to George had so much the air of Gay cruising about them that we’re not at all surprised when Jess tries to rape him. George flees with his virginity intact but then heads to the wharf and contemplates suicide. He’s talked out of it by the other model on the shoot, the more sympathetic Tani (Joyce Meadows), but he spends the next few months of his life reading every sexology book he can get his hands on from the New York Public Library. He knows he’s not a straight man and not a Gay man either, but just what he is eludes him until he reads a book by doctor and researcher Professor Estabrook (Will Kuluva) called Man and His Glands. Professor Estabrook has developed a theory that humans’ behavior is determined by their glands, and he’s astonished that young George attends all his lectures, reads all his books and journal articles, and is genuinely interested in his theories while his colleagues scoff at him. Estabrook draws a sample of George’s blood, he has it tested, and he finds that George’s blood contains a high concentration of the female hormone estrogen, equivalent to the normal amount for a woman but not a man. Estabrook tells George that American laws prohibit gender-reassignment operations in the United States but there’s a doctor in Denmark, Victor Dahlmann (Oscar Beregi, Jr.), who’s interested in performing one if he can find the right patient. Since the Jorgensen family’s ancestral home was Denmark, it’s relatively easy for George to arrange a trip there under the guise of visiting relatives and (at least in the movie) signing on to do a photo essay of Denmark’s famous landmarks. George settles in Copenhagen and stays with his Aunt Thora Petersen (Joan Tompkins). He sees a photo of a teenage blonde woman and asks Aunt Thora who that was. “My daughter,” he says. “I didn’t know you were ever married!” George exclaims. “I wasn’t,” she says, adding that the girl died in her teens.

George comes out to Aunt Thora and tells her the real reason he’s in Copenhagen. He gets in touch with Dr. Dahlmann and is ready to sign the consent form for the operation immediately even though Dahlmann tries to explain just how complicated the procedure will be and the potential risks. (One irony is that George can’t read the form because it’s printed in Danish, though Dr. Dahlmann’s later case notes on him are in English so the audience can understand them.) Then we get several minutes of medical porn as we’re treated to close-in shots of the surgery in progress, not enough to create problems with the motion picture ratings code – though after all the surgeries are finished we get some nice shots of John Hansen’s chest as we’re told the breasts are expanding because of all the estrogen he’s taking. (One of the original researchers on the birth control pill likewise grew a set of breasts from the female hormones he was working with, though they went away again when his work on the project ended.) When she emerges from the transition she asks Aunt Thora if she can take the name “Christine” after Aunt Thora’s late daughter, and the aunt agrees. For the rest of the film Christine Jorgensen is subjected to huge media exposure, almost all of it sneeringly negative, calling her a “he-she” and various even less pleasant things. Aunt Thora’s home in Copenhagen is set upon by reporters who demand to get Christine’s side of her story after the barrage of negative publicity – started, we learn later, by a worker in the office responsible for giving out American passports in Denmark, who for $200 leaked the information to the media that an American woman who used to be an American man was applying for a passport in her new identity. This is something that she wouldn’t be allowed to do today, thanks to an executive order from President Trump that states all U.S. passports must be under the person’s gender at birth, just in case you’re tempted to believe that the road to acceptance for Trans people has gone in a straight line forward since Christine Jorgensen’s time. Christine returns home in her new identity and wins the acceptance of her parents, who are reluctant at first but realize that’s the only way she’ll still be part of their lives. (The real Christine Jorgensen gave an ultimatum to her parents: treat me as the woman I am or you’ll never see me again.) Christine also meets a reporter, Tom Crawford (Quinn K. Redeker), for Globe magazine (read: Life), who wants to interview her at length and really tell her side of the story. Tom is also sexually attracted to Christine, but she’s too scared of a relationship even though Dr. Dahlmann told her she could function as a woman sexually and be intimate with a man.

While I was watching The Christine Jorgensen Story I was thinking of my comment about the 1934 film Imitation of Life, “I get the impression the filmmakers wanted to make an anti-racist movie but didn’t quite know how.” Likewise, the makers of The Christine Jorgensen Story – producer Edward Small, director Irving Rapper (both of them at the ends of their careers; it was Small’s last film and Rapper’s next-to-last), and writers Robert E. Kent and Ellis St. Joseph – wanted to make a pro-Trans movie but didn’t quite know how. Certainly there’s a sense of liberation from old Hollywood hands like Small and Rapper that at last, with the breakdown of the old Motion Picture Production Code, they could get away with making a film that would have been completely verboten between 1934 and 1968. But there’s also the age-old problem with stories about Trans people: how do you cast them? I remember reading a quite impressive book called Trans-Sister Radio and thinking it would have made a marvelous movie, only the one conceivable way of casting it would have been to find an actor who was actually Trans and film them on both sides of a gender transition. The film Transamerica pulled it off by having a woman, Felicity Huffman, play the Transwoman central character and only showing her post-transition (and she won an Academy Award nomination for it). John Hanson wasn’t a bad choice overall; he’s sufficiently ambiguous in his gender presentation he’s believable as both a man and a woman (though as Christine he looks less like a womyn-born woman and more like a very good drag queen). The problem is he wasn’t an experienced actor, and there are flashes of brilliance in his performance in which he really dramatizes vividly the character’s dilemmas. Unfortunately, they remain only flashes and for most of the movie he delivers his line in a flat first-day-of-acting-school monotone, while the voiceover narration he gives doesn’t sound that credible as either a man or a woman. One imdb.com reviewer, Christopher Greenleaf, compared this film to Ed Wood’s infamous Glen or Glenda? (1953) – which was originally supposed to be about Christine Jorgensen, only she wanted way too much money for the rights – and argued that, despite the celebrated technical ineptitude of Glen or Glenda?, “Wood was way ahead of his time and actually delivered a much better and (believe it or not) more serious picture.”

That’s overstating it more than a little bit, but The Christine Jorgensen Story (like the life story of its subject) is at once an odd footnote in the history of exploitation cinema and a well-meaning attempt at telling the story of the first post-op Transwoman (she wasn’t, but at least she was the first who went public with her story and used her 15 minutes of fame to advocate for the rights of fellow Trans people) with some sensitivity and depth, Just about everyone who writes about this movie mentions that Irving Rapper directed Bette Davis in three films – Now, Voyager, The Corn Is Green, and Deception – which is actually a fair criticism of what’s wrong with it. Like Vincent Sherman, Rapper could handle a self-starting star like Davis or Joan Crawford but was virtually hopeless with the cast of mostly non-actors, or at least lousy actors (Joan Tompkins as Aunt Thora is the only cast member who really makes her character come alive), he had here. It also doesn’t help that Edward Small had a pretty minuscule budget – maybe not as low as Ed Wood’s for filming Glen or Glenda?, but too little to avoid such anachronisms as the streets in both New York and Copenhagen being full of late-1960’s cars for scenes supposedly taking place in the early 1950’s. Though the film was nominally based on Jorgensen’s autobiography, and Jorgensen got a credit as one of the technical advisors, it was highly fictionalized in ways that make me want to read the book just to see what the filmmakers got wrong, especially since one ominous sign was the co-writing credit to Robert E. Kent. My defining anecdote about Robert E. Kent was the one about how he was a major baseball fan, and in the studio’s writing room he’d regale his colleagues with accounts of the ballgame he’d seen the night before while his fingers would fly over his typewriter keys banging out the cinematically appropriate clichés for his latest script. I’d like to think that Kent delivered at least a little more thought to his work on The Christine Jorgensen Story than usual.

Johanna Enlists (Mary Pickford Productions, Artcraft, 1918)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 23) Turner Classic Movies offered as their “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature a 1918 film called Johanna Enlists, directed by William Desmond Taylor (whose still-mysterious death in 1922 – he was shot but it’s never been definitively determined by whom or why – is about the only thing anybody remembers about him) and produced by its star, Mary Pickford. Johanna Enlists began life as a short story by Rupert Hughes, Howard Hughes’s uncle, called “The Mobilizing of Johanna.” From the title I was expecting a story in which Johanna Ransaller (Mary Pickford) was so excited by the patriotic fervor surrounding America’s entry into World War I that she donned male drag and literally enlisted. (There are a number of recorded instances of this happening during the American Revolution and the Civil War, but by 1917 it was standard practice to give enlistees physical examinations that would have “outed” any drag kings who tried to get in.) Instead it’s a rural comedy set on a farm in which Johanna is forced to work relentlessly and regularly beaten by her mother (Anne Schaefer) whenever she tries to slack out of line. At one point Johanna offers a prayer to God to send her a “beau” to liberate her from her drab farm existence. Instead God, Rupert Hughes, or Frances Marion (Pickford’s long-time writer, who did the screenplay) send her a whole regiment of them, courtesy of the U.S. Army, which is preparing to deploy them in France. When the site where they were supposed to camp falls through for some reason Hughes or Marion don’t make clear, they approach Ma Ransaller and her husband (Fred Huntley) for permission to rent their farm for the next few weeks. Naturally, Johanna is overjoyed at the presence of so many men in her life, and while the officer in charge of the outfit, Col. Roberts, is played by an instantly recognizable Wallace Beery, some of the men under his command are genuinely attractive. Among them are Lieutenant Frank LeRoy (Emory Johnson) and Private Vibbard (Monte Blue, the only cast member besides Pickford and Beery we’ve seen in anything else), though the one Johanna is most attracted to is Captain Archie van Rensselaer (Douglas MacLean) because he arrives at the Ransaller farm already ill and Johanna has to nurse him back to health.

Johanna is also in search of glamour, which she reads about in magazines, including one that recommends milk baths as the way to have great skin. So she makes herself a milk bath, laboriously pouring bucket after bucket of milk (presumably fresh, since they are on a farm after all!) into her tub and lowering herself into it in a surprisingly graphic sequence even for this genuinely “pre-Code” era. (There’s also a scene in which Johanna is shown bathing her younger twin sisters, played by June and Jean Prentis. At first I saw their names in the cast list and thought that even in 1918 the filmmakers were pulling the trick of casting twins as a baby character to avoid violating California’s laws on how many hours a day kids can work, but no-o-o-o-o: the actors were really playing twins.) Alas, Johanna’s milk bath is rudely interrupted by LeRoy and Vibbard, who walk into the room where she’s taking it and have a fight in which the tub is knocked over and all the milk spills out over the floor. Johanna has an innovative way of cleaning it up; she lets loose a pride of puppies on the floor and they eagerly lap up the milk. But the incident results in LeRoy preferring charges against Vibbard and putting him on trial in a court-martial in which Johanna becomes the star witness. Ultimately she’s able to persuade LeRoy to drop the charges against Vibbard, who’s acquitted (we’re not quite sure of what), and both men are free even though the one Johanna ends up with is Lt. Rensselaer, because the similarity in their tongue-twisting last names indicate that they’re both descendants of the Old Dutch nobility who colonized New York (or “New Amsterdam,” as they called it) in the first place. (I still remember the marvelous scene in the 1970’s TV-movie Eleanor and Franklin in which Franklin Roosevelt laconically proposes to Eleanor by saying, “Mr. Roosevelt would like to know if Miss Roosevelt will consent to becoming Mrs. Roosevelt.”) At the end there’s a breast-beating patriotic climax in which Pickford, as an honorary colonel in the U.S. military, poses next to Ralph Faneuf, the real colonel who commanded the real-life regiment seen in the film.

Johanna Enlists was preserved in an unusual way: the only surviving print was found in 1956 in the archives of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (an odd place indeed to be involved in film preservation, though maybe the Agriculture Department was involved because the film takes place on a farm) and printed down to 16 mm. Unfortunately, the sole print was missing the first half of the third reel, which was reconstructed here via production stills and intertitles either copied from the cutting continuity (a record of a completed film after it’s edited, as compared with the shooting script which was frequently revised on the spot during production) or newly written. (The newly written titles were indicated by an icon of a typewriter in the lower right-hand corner.) This is something of a surprise because Mary Pickford was usually meticulous about preserving copies of all her movies (though at one point late in her life she briefly considered destroying them all; luckily, she didn’t). Another film she let slip through the cracks was Rosita, made in 1923 and the first American credit for director Ernst Lubitsch (I’ve published a commentary on it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/01/rosita-mary-pickford-company-united.html), a quite good Carmen-esque melodrama set in historic Spain. I’m not sure what I think of Johanna Enlists as a whole; it’s obviously a well-made movie (director Taylor wasn’t exactly a major innovator on the order of Griffith, De Mille, or Stroheim, but he certainly knew his way around a set and had a basic command of the grammar of film as it existed c. 1918) with flashes of brilliance. But it’s also a flawed film in many respects, including the flibbertigibbet nature of much of Pickford’s performance (like coyness and simpering, an occupational hazard for silent-film heroines) and the forced “rustic” writing of the intertitles to denote the characters’ rural accents, and frankly I think I’d have liked it better if Johanna really had enlisted. The production credit to “Artcraft” was a prestige label invented by Pickford’s usual home studio, Paramount, until First National lured her away later in 1918 and she ended up as one of the co-founders of United Artists – and according to another co-founder, Charlie Chaplin, Pickford knew more about the articles of incorporation and other legal documents than any of the other partners or their attorneys: she was that good as a businesswoman.

24 Hour Alert (Warner Bros., Mark VII Limited, United States Air Force, Walt Disney Productions, 1955)

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

After Johanna Enlists Turner Classic Movies showed a 31-minute short from 1955 called 24 Hour Alert, produced by Cedric Francis, directed by Robert M. Leeds, and starring Jack Webb in a bizarre propaganda tale about the Cold War and in particular the defenses against a sneak attack by a foreign power (carefully unnamed in the Beirne Lay, Jr./Richard L. Breen script, but any 1955 audience member would have known they meant the Soviet Union) the U.S. Air Force had instituted. Webb introduces himself in the same laconic, understated way in which he proclaimed his identity as Sgt. Joe Friday on the iconic TV show Dragnet. In fact, it was Dragnet that had brought him to Warner Bros. in the first place: they signed him to do a feature-film version of the show, which my husband Charles and I watched years ago on a VHS home tape. I remember that when Webb as Friday referenced an “eyeball witness” in the dialogue, both Charles and I immediately thought of the same joke: “What did the ‘eyeball witness’ see the eyeball doing?” Anyway, 24 Hour Alert had an intriguing set of production company credits: Warner Bros., Mark VII (Webb’s production company), the U.S. Air Force, and Walt Disney Productions (though since the film doesn’t contain any animated sequences, Disney’s role is unclear). Its basic message is an attack on the NIMBY’s (“Not In My Back Yard”) who were challenging the Air Force’s network of bases in semi-urban areas and asking them to move. The story is set in a smallish town called “Millville” whose mayor, Hogan (Walter Sande), is dead set against the Air Force base in or just outside Millville. He’s getting plenty of complaints from the local residents, mostly about the noise the planes at the base are making – especially when they cross the speed of sound and emit loud, nerve-shattering sonic booms.

The main plane seen here is the U.S. Air Force’s first supersonic fighter plane to go faster than sound without an assist from another plane taking it aloft (as the various X-series experimental planes had to have to cross the sound barrier), though we also get to see earlier jet fighters like the F-86, which couldn’t go supersonic but was still America’s workhorse fighter in the then recently-concluded Korean War. Many of the planes seen in the film carry the designation “F-U” before the registration numbers on their noses, which was probably considered unobjectionable then but seems almost hilarious in its naïveté today. The mayor of Millville, along with one of the town’s City Councilmembers, fly a private, propeller-driven plane to Washington, D.C. to lobby the Air Force to move the base out of Millville after various noise complaints from Millvillians, including some from a chinchilla farmer who complains that the noise from the jets is waking up the chinchillas and making them unhealthy. As luck would have it, on his way back his plane is trapped in a fog that makes it virtually impossible to land, especially since its radio has failed and thereby cut out its pilot’s ability to communicate with ground control. No problem: the Air Force base commander sends up a plane to signal the pilot of the mayor’s plane visually and guide it in for a safe landing. Mayor Hogan is so grateful that he immediately reverses his position on whether the base should remain open in Millville, but a number of City Councilmembers who didn’t have his experience of the Air Force’s beneficence still want to see the base moved. Webb, his old Army Air Corps World War II buddy Col. Jim Breech (Art Ballinger), and others in the operation of the base work out the idea of hosting a big festival featuring stunt flyers and the Air Force’s latest cool hardware to ease public opposition, and of course it works. Much of the last third of the film consists of stunning footage of Air Force planes flying in formation, and even earlier than that we’ve seen a scene in which an Air Force fighter manages to bump the defective landing gear of a B-25 bomber into place so the B-25 can land safely: an amazing feat of precision flying. 24 Hour Alert is a fascinating souvenir of a time when most Americans basically trusted their government to do what was right for them, and its message is that sonic booms and the accompanying lost hours of sleep are a small price to pay for protecting our “freedom” against the evil people and nations who want to take it away.

Chinatown (Paramount, Penthouse Video, Long Road Productions, Robert Evans Company, 1974)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 22) Turner Classic Movies showed one of their double bills co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and actor Nathan Lane. They picked two films noir, the 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity (directed by Billy Wilder and co-scripted by him and Raymond Chandler from a source novel by James M. Cain) and the 1974 neo-noir Chinatown (directed by Roman Polanski from a script by Robert Towne which Polanski heavily rewrote). I’ve long appreciated Double Indemnity but I hadn’t seen Chinatown since my mother took me to see it in its original theatrical release. I didn’t like it then and I still don’t. The publicity for Chinatown said that it had revived the spirit of classic noir, which it decidedly didn’t. I had a sense of The Emperor’s New Clothes when both Mankiewicz and Lane prattled on both before and after the movie about how great it was – Lane even called it “perhaps the perfect movie” – when I didn’t like it when it first came out and I don’t like it any better now. Chinatown is a vaguely comprehensible tale about how the super-rich villain, Noah Cross (John Huston in a great man-you-love-to-hate performance that’s easily the best thing about the film, even though his presence inevitably had me thinking it would have been a much better film if he’d directed it as well, especially since he probably would have dispatched the story in two-thirds of Polanski’s bloated and ponderous 130-minute running time), has hatched a scheme to take over the San Fernando Valley and make millions of dollars off it on top of the millions he’s already accumulated. His plan involves cutting off the irrigation water that the orange growers in the Valley desperately need to grow their crops, then persuading the citizens of Los Angeles County to approve an $8 million dam project. Ostensibly the dam is to provide the residents of Los Angeles with water, but Cross really wants it to go to the Valley so the housing developments he plans to build there will have water.

The hero, to the extent this film has one, is private investigator J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson, top-billed), who like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer specializes in “divorce work” – in documenting extra-relational affairs being carried on by his clients’ spouses and using those photos either as grounds for divorce or ways to cut down on the amount of settlement money his well-to-do clients have to pay. (Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe famously eschewed such work as inherently unethical.) Gittes gets involved when he’s hired by a woman who claims to be Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), wife of Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who’s opposed to the dam project because he thinks the porous shale bedrock they want to build it on top of won’t withstand the weight and the dam will eventually collapse and flood the city. (The character was supposedly based on the real-life William Mulholland, who ran the Department of Water and Power and ensured that Los Angeles would have an ample water supply even though its natural climate is desert.) Gittes’s photographer captures clandestine pictures of Hollis Mulwray apparently frolicking with a young girl, and the photos end up on the front page of a Los Angeles newspaper. Then Gittes gets an office visit from the real Evelyn Mulwray, who threatens to sue him for the way he framed her husband. Ultimately Gittes learns that the woman who posed as Mrs. Mulwray was aspiring actress Ida Sessions (an early role for Diane Ladd), though in the meantime the case spirals out of control when Hollis Mulwray is found dead in a reservoir. Later Ida Sessions is also found dead in her apartment after she and Gittes had an appointment in which she was supposed to Tell Him All She Knows. While all this has been going on, Gittes has drifted into an affair with Evelyn Mulwray and been shot at by a number of people, including angry orange growers who think he’s with the Department of Water and Power. Gittes has also discovered that a secret financier, who of course turns out to be Noah Cross, has been buying up the orange ranches and using the names of residents of a local nursing home as fronts.

We also learn that the “other woman” with whom Hollis Mulwray was apparently having an affair with was actually Evelyn’s daughter Katherine (Belinda Palmer), and both Evelyn and Katherine were fathered by, you guessed it, Noah Cross. This piece of information – Evelyn insisting to Gittes, “She’s my daughter and my sister” – so angers Gittes that he slaps her repeatedly, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, for the first few takes Jack Nicholson pulled the blow so as not to hurt Faye Dunaway for real. But director Polanski didn’t think the result looked convincing, so at Dunaway’s suggestion Nicholson slapped her for real, at full force – and that’s the take that ended up in the final cut. The film’s title gets explained in the final scene, in which two hit men hired by Noah Cross murder Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown just as Gittes is getting ready to drive her and Katherine to Mexico to hide out from dad’s vengeance. Noah then swoops up Katherine, strongly suggesting that the cycle of incest is going to continue and he’s going to deflower her, too. This was the ending Polanski insisted on, overruling Robert Towne’s desire to have the escape to Mexico be successful. One of the two official police detectives who’d been harassing Gittes all movie tells him, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” – a closing line that’s become iconic. (It got recycled in the part-live, part-animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Toontown.”)

I first saw Chinatown as I was making my acquaintance with the classic films noir of the 1940’s, and while the critics who reviewed Chinatown when it was new acclaimed it as a successful recreation of that style, I strongly disagreed (and still do). First of all, Jack Nicholson – an actor I usually dislike, though I loved him as The Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman because the shark-like smile and the vulpine laugh, which usually put me off, were exactly right for that character – is all wrong to play a noir lead. He doesn’t have the world-weariness and depth of the great 1940’s noir stars (Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd). There were some battles between Polanski and the film’s producer, former Paramount studio head Robert Evans; Evans wanted the film shot in black-and-white and he also wanted Jane Fonda to play the female lead. I don’t know about the first (a black-and-white Chinatown would have looked like an even more inept attempt to reproduce classic film noir than the one we have) and I’m with Polanski on the second: Jane Fonda would have been too tough, too independent, too powerful. Faye Dunaway was just right even though she was a limited actress with only two truly great films on her résumé (Bonnie and Clyde and Network). The long early establishing shots of Hollis Mulwray soulfully looking out at the city’s various reservoirs struck me then, and still do, as the sensibility of the 1970’s uneasily grafted on to a film nominally set in the 1930’s. It also doesn’t help that Nicholson as Gittes wears a silly-looking bandage covering his nose through the middle third of the film. That bandage was put there after Gittes was accosted by two thugs, one of whom – the one who actually slashed his nose, and told him that unless he laid off the Mulwray case, next time he’d cut off the nose completely – was played by Roman Polanski himself. This time around I couldn’t help but be reminded of the equally silly-looking bandage Donald Trump wore throughout the 2024 Republican National Convention days after his ear was supposedly grazed by an assassin’s bullet (though I’ve long believed both the alleged assassination attempts on Trump were Sensations of 1945-style gimmicks faked for publicity and sympathy). Of course this time around I couldn’t help but think of Trump when I watched John Huston as Noah Cross, dominating the screen as well as his character dominates the lives of everyone else in the film. Though there’s no evidence that Trump ever actually had incestuous sex with his daughter Ivanka, much less fathered a child with her, Trump did say during the 2016 campaign, “If she weren’t my daughter, I’d date her.” Certainly both the fictitious Noah Cross and the all too real Donald Trump are case studies in the ability of the super-rich to buy their way out of any accountability for their myriad crimes!

The Strip (MGM, 1951)

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

After Roman Polanski’s dull, ponderous attempt to re-create the classic world of film noir in Chinatown, the next item on Turner Classic Movies’ November 22 schedule was a much better film that was shown on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program even though it isn’t really film noir at all. It was The Strip, made by Mickey Rooney on his old stamping ground, MGM Studios, even though he’d asked for a release from his contract after Words and Music in 1948 and was then free-lancing. (For some reason, TCM cut off the studio logo usually shown at the start of MGM’s films even though a shrunken version of the logo is clearly visible on the main title card.) The Strip begins with an aerial shot of a police car speeding down the Sunset Strip at 4:30 a.m. (though it’s already daylight) while a stentorian narrator explains that because the Sunset Strip is not technically part of the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office has jurisdiction. The police car comes to a stop in front of an apartment building, where they find 25-year-old dancer, cigarette girl, and aspiring actress Jane Tafford (Sally Forrest) badly wounded but still alive. The sheriff’s deputies pick up Stanley Maxton (Mickey Rooney) on suspicion of having assaulted Jane, and when he references Jane’s other boyfriend, gangster Delwyn “Sonny” Johnson (James Craig, one of the many actors MGM tried out as would-be Clark Gables while the real one was fighting in World War II and didn’t know what to do with once the genuine Gable returned in 1944), and says he’d like to kill him, the sheriff’s deputies announce that Johnson was himself killed that night in his palatial beachfront home. The rest of the film is a flashback narrated by Maxton (though we don’t hear Mickey Rooney deliver a voice-over) which tells his story.

Maxton had served in the Korean War and ended up in a Veterans’ Administration hospital in Kansas City recovering from unspecified injuries, either physical or mental. (Today they’d be attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder, but MGM and screenwriter Allan Rivkin were probably well aware of the danger in stories about veterans with PTSD from the experience Raymond Chandler had put Paramount through on the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia. Chandler had wanted the killer in that film to be William Bendix’s character, severely damaged psychologically as well as physically from a brain injury he suffered in World War II, but when the Department of the Navy got word that Chandler had written that, they immediately threatened Paramount with withdrawal of their cooperation from any subsequent Paramount film – so Chandler had to write an abysmally unconvincing alternate ending.) Maxton has announced that upon discharge he intends to travel to Los Angeles and seek out a career as a jazz drummer, and to this end his buddies at the VA hospital have bought him a set of drums, which he tries out in a jam on Bob Carleton’s 1920’s song “Ja-Da.” Unfortunately, while he’s on the road to L.A. he and his car are run off the road by Sonny Johnson and his girlfriend de jour, and both the car and (more importantly for Maxton at the moment) his new drum set are totaled. No problem, Sonny insists to Maxton: he can give him a job in his enterprise, which he tells Maxton is an insurance business but it’s really a bookie joint. When the joint is raided by police (who break in through an absurdly flimsy door that looks like it was made of balsa wood). Maxton flees and gets into a car being driven by Jane. She takes him to her workplace, Fluff’s Dixie Land club on the Strip, where she introduces him to her boss, Fluff (William Demarest), who’s also its piano player. Eddie Muller said ordinarily this part would have gone to Jimmy Durante or Hoagy Carmichael, both of whom could really play piano, but Demarest had to fake it as best he could.

The house band is Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars (mistakenly billed as “Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra” in the opening credits, even though he’d broken up his big band four years before he made this movie) back when they really lived up to that name. Besides Armstrong on trumpet and vocals, they included Barney Bigard on clarinet, Jack Teagarden on trombone and vocals, Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano, Arvell Shaw on bass, and William “Cozy” Cole on drums. (For some racist reason, though MGM allowed Armstrong and Hines to show their Black faces on camera because they were stars, Shaw and Cole both had white guys doubling for them on screen. The same year MGM did the same thing to Charles Mingus, who played bass for Red Norvo’s trio in the Red Skelton/Ann Miller musical Texas Carnival, but when their number was filmed a white bassist doubled for Mingus on screen.) As luck would have it, Fluff’s previous drummer was just drafted to serve in Korea (the same war Maxton was just discharged from) and he needs a replacement in a hurry. At first glance playing drums for Louis Armstrong would seem like the sort of dream gig any musician would die for, but Maxton, who’s been working for Johnson for over a year and making twice as much money as Fluff can afford to pay him, hesitates. The next day he changes his mind and takes the gig so he can cruise Jane at Fluff’s, though Jane isn’t interested in him “that way” and tells Fluff to tell Maxton he has approval over any guy who wants to date a woman on his staff. Eventually Maxton and Jane do start dating, only she complains that what she really wants is a break to get into pictures. Maxton accordingly introduces her to Sonny, thinking he hosts enough parties for Hollywood bigwigs he can introduce her to someone who can jump-start her career. Actually Sonny has no intention of doing any such thing; he’s just stringing her along until he can get in her pants. Sonny takes Jane to such real-life clubs on Sunset Strip as Ciro’s and The Mocambo, while Maxton follows them around and is essentially stalking them.

Fortunately, along the way we get to hear a lot of great music from Armstrong and the All-Stars, including a marvelous medley of the pop-gospel song “Shadrack” (about the three Jewish men, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who refused to worship the Babylonian gods and were threatened to be thrown into a fiery furnace by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego actually survived the furnace because God protected them; the song had previously been recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1938, but that version had only featured Armstrong as singer with the Lyn Murray Chorus) and the traditional song “When the Saints Go Marching In.” When my husband Charles (who came home last night in the middle of the film) and I had watched it before, I had marveled at the remarkable trombone solo Jack Teagarden played on “Shadrack” in which he didn’t move his slide at all and controlled pitch only with his lips. I had misremembered the sequence; it occurs after the band has segued into “When the Saints Go Marching In” and it lasts for just one phrase. Even so, Teagarden was famous for never pushing his slide past the fourth of the seven standard positions (according to Teagarden himself, that was because he’d learned trombone as a child, when his arms were still too short to reach past the fourth position). The big featured song from the film was “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” which is actually introduced with William Demarest croak-singing it in a duet with Mickey Rooney (much the way the song “Silver Bells” from the movie The Lemon Drop Kid, also made in 1951, was introduced in a croak-sung version by Willliam Frawley!) and is then performed by Kay Brown as a singer at Fluff’s before Armstrong and company finally give it to us beautifully in the final scene.

After we’ve heard the story, the film cuts back to the sheriff’s station, where Maxton impulsively confesses to Sonny’s murder to save Jane from taking the fall, only he’s spared by a deathbed confession from Jane herself, who dictated her own account – she confronted Sonny at his place, they wrestled for his gun (not another “they both reached for the gun” gimmick!) and both got shot, him fatally; she managed to get back to her own apartment before she lost consciousness) – and lasted long enough to sign it before she finally expired from her wounds. It was this surprisingly downbeat ending that led Eddie Muller to call The Strip film noir even though until then there’s been nothing particularly noir about it either thematically or visually. Rivkin’s script was given serviceable direction by Laszlo Kardos (an Old Country friend of producer Joe Pasternack), though he “Anglicized” his first name to “Leslie” and that’s how he’s billed here. The Strip is quite a genre-bender, at once crime drama, whodunit, romantic comedy, and musical, with the musical elements consistently the best parts. Besides Armstrong and his All-Stars, the film features Monica Lewis, a blonde who doesn’t look at all Latina, singing a Spanish-language ballad called “La Bota,” and Vic Damone singing “Don’t Blame Me” by Jimmy McHugh (melody) and Dorothy Fields (lyrics). Vic Damone had a hit with the 1949 song “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas,” but it was also recorded by the incomparable Mel Tormé – and likewise on “Don’t Blame Me” he was competing with Sarah Vaughan’s record on Musicraft, which was far better and more sensitively phrased. I quite liked this movie even though there’s nothing truly great about it; still it worked a lot better for me than the far more highly regarded Chinatown did!

The American Revolution, part 5: "The Soul of All America" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 20, 2025)

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, November 20) I watched the fifth and next-to-last episode of the major documentary Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David P. Schmidt, The American Revolution: “The Soul of All America.” This episode covered the years 1778 and 1779 and covered the catastrophic winter George Washington and his army spent in the freezing cold of an abandoned ironworks at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania as well as the long-sought alliance between the U.S. and France. The French entry into the war on the American side (and the likelihood that Spain and The Netherlands would soon join them, Spain in hopes of regaining their former colonies in the West Indies they’d lost to Britain in the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, and The Netherlands may have dreamed of retaking New York, formerly New Amsterdam, from the British) turned the American Revolution into a European conflict. The French sent a fleet of ships too big for American harbors and gave its command to Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who proved spectacularly incompetent. Defeated by the British Navy in their first sea battle off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island, d’Estaing then sailed for the West Indies, where he tried and failed to conquer the British-held islands of St. Lucia and Grenada. Ultimately he was recalled to France after a coordinated attack by the French and American navies on the British position at Savannah, Georgia in 1780 also failed. D’Estaing was replaced by François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who led the French participation in the successful siege of Yorktown, Virginia in 1781 that finally won the war for the U.S., and when he returned to France he was targeted by its own revolutionaries after 1789 and guillotined in 1794 largely due to his friendship with the deposed Queen Marie Antoinette. “The Soul of All America” also featured a segment on U.S. naval commander John Paul Jones, who sailed a barely seaworthy ship called the Bonhomme Richard (after the French title for Benjamin Franklin’s book Poor Richard’s Almanack) and staged a series of successful raids on British ships sailing to bring supplies to their embattled armies in America.

Most guerrilla campaigns by rebels seeking to regain control of their countries by foreign forces work by wearing down the willingness of the government of the occupying country to resist – the collapse of public support for the U.S. war in Viet Nam was the most obvious modern example – and the American Revolution was no exception. As the war dragged on and the British Parliament started to realize that the Americans wouldn’t be the pushovers they’d thought originally (much as the modern-day Russians have gradually realized that the Ukrainians won’t going to be the pushovers they originally thought), a number of Members of Parliament started to wonder just why they were putting so much money and resources into what was beginning to look like an unwinnable war. What’s more, the American Revolution was one that was dragging other European countries into alliance against the British, and it was threatening important parts of the British Empire, including not only the West Indies but also the port of Gibraltar on the Spanish coast. Meanwhile, the Americans were able to retake Philadelphia and return the Continental Congress there after its exile to an old meeting house in York, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the most moving part of this episode was the sequence which depicted the roller-coaster ride the population of Philadelphia went through as the city went from American to British control and then back, and when Philadelphia finally went back to the Americans a number of the Loyalists that had sought refuge there fled to New York, which remained under British control until the war finally ended and the British withdrew. There was also a segment about the American campaign against the Native Americans throughout what later became known as the American Midwest, where American raiders got as far as modern-day Illinois before they were stopped by Native resistance and the anxieties of Colonial commanders who called them back to the main front. This part of the documentary reinforces the critique of Left-wing historians who point out that the rise of the United States was inexorably tied in with genocide against the Native Americans and the economic prosperity of a nation built on the labor of enslaved African-Americans.

The American Revolution, part 6: “The Most Sacred Thing” (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 21, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, November 21) my husband Charles and I watched “The Most Sacred Thing,” the sixth and last episode of the mega-documentary mini-series The American Revolution directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. “The Most Sacred Thing” dealt with the years 1778 to 1781 (when combat in the American Revolution effectively ended with the British defeat at Yorktown, Virginia) and beyond, well beyond. Ken Burns and company chose to make The American Revolution at a time in our history when the whole question of whether the United States will remain a democratic republic or degenerate into tyranny the way Plato said all democracies would is frighteningly open. Among the many events that call into question America’s future as a republic that happened during the six days PBS was airing this program were Donald Trump hosting Mohammed Bin Salman, crown prince and effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, at the White House with full honors; him giving Ukraine an ultimatum that they must effectively accept his terms (which are basically the same as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s) for an end to the war or face the total withdrawal of American support; and his extraordinary threat to six sitting Democratic members of Congress (Senators Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, and Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, and House of Representatives members Jason Crow, D-Colorado; Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio, D-Pennsylvania; and Maggie Goodlander, D-New Hampshire) that they should be tried, convicted, and executed for “seditious behaviour at the highest level.” The “crime” for which Trump wants them put to death was making a social-media video telling U.S. servicemembers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders, and indeed they have a legal obligation to resist them. Already I’ve received texts from Slotkin and Kelly asking me to respond by – guess what? – donating to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. I’m sure Trump envies the power Putin and MBS (as the Saudi crown prince is universally called) of simply having their political enemies put to death without bothering with such niceties as due process and a criminal justice system.

The “Most Sacred Thing” episode of The American Revolution covered the period during which George Washington fiercely sought to coordinate his operations with those of the French officers and troops sent to bail out the Revolution despite the fact that they literally didn’t know each other’s languages – most of the Frenchmen sent to aid the American Revolution spoke no English and almost none of the Americans knew French. He also brought in the German Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben to train his troops and give them a sense of real discipline. Von Steuben (who’s become so much of a hero to German-Americans they even hold “Steuben Day parades” in cities with large German-descended populations; one figures prominently in John Hughes’s teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) had been driven out of Europe for having seduced underage boys, and while I’m not sure whether his sexual activities would have been considered part of a Gay identity today, he was definitely attracted to his own gender. Steuben was bilingual in German and French, but the only English word he knew when he arrived was “Goddamn!” So he would swear colorfully in the languages he did know until the troops got the message that he disapproved of their screw-ups. Also the French expeditionary force sent to aid the Americans, the Expédition Particulière, was led by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, and like the French officers assigned to command the navy (Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who had the job until 1780; and François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who replaced him after d’Estaing bombed badly in a naval battle with the British on the open seas outside Virginia in 1780), he spoke barely any English. The person brought along to interpret for him was a Swedish diplomat named Axel von Fersen, who later became friends (and possibly more than that) with French queen Marie Antoinette. Unlike most of the French officers who helped win the American Revolution, Rochambeau narrowly escaped the guillotine when his own country erupted into revolt in 1789. He was actually scheduled to be executed when the so-called “Thermidorian Reaction” of 1794 abruptly brought an end to the Reign of Terror and saved his life, and he was rehabilitated by Napoleon, allowed to retire with honors, and died quietly in 1807 at age 81.

One of the fascinating stories about the American Revolution is that the cause was nearly lost because the U.S. Congress had no money to pay the troops, and therefore a number of them mutinied. Washington ended one mutiny by negotiating with the mutineers and getting them to re-enlist; he ended another by hanging the two ringleaders in full view of their followers and thus scaring the rest of the men into submission (which may be what Trump meant when he said of the six sitting U.S. Senators and House members he’s accused of “seditious behavior,” “Hang them! George Washington would”). The immediate crisis ended when the French arrived and paid off the restive American troops in silver coins instead of worthless Continental paper money, but even after the Revolution ended (with a 1783 treaty that, though it was negotiated in Paris, involved direct talks between the Americans and British that did not include the French, despite their decisive role in winning the Revolution in the first place), there were still mutinies. One of the most famous was Shays’s Rebellion, which took place in Massachusetts in 1786-1787 and was led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays. It was ultimately put down by a militia force led by another Revolutionary War commander, Benjamin Lincoln, but the spectre of civil war on top of what had already largely been a civil war (a number of battles in the Revolution featured Loyalist Americans fighting in support of the British Crown against their fellow Americans on the Patriot side, including some instances of brother against brother) led to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Originally called just to revise the Articles of Confederation of 1778, which had created a federal government but a surprisingly weak one with no independent taxing authority, the Convention decided early on to write an entirely new founding document which became the Constitution of the United States. George Washington chaired the Constitutional Convention, and one reason the President was given such extensive authority was everyone at the Convention assumed Washington would be the first one. At the same time some of the people who later became the nucleus of the Federalist Party wanted an even more powerful executive: Alexander Hamilton wanted the President to be elected for life (it was the biggest battle he lost at the Convention) and John Adams wanted a more royal-sounding title for the chief executive, which Washington successfully stopped. (At the same time I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons the United States didn’t become a monarchy was Washington’s low sperm count. Washington never had children of his own, though one of his wife Martha’s sons by her late first husband called himself “George Washington, Jr.,” and you can’t very well start an hereditary monarchy with someone who can’t produce heirs.)

The saddest part of The American Revolution’s final episode was the treatment of Native Americans and African-Americans who had fought in the war on both the Patriot and Loyalist sides. A number of Black slaves who had joined the British army lured by promises of freedom after the war if the British won were ordered returned to their owners, and some fled to Canada rather than allow that to happen. As for the Natives, long-standing tribal alliances split over the question of which side would be better for them to ally with, and as I’ve noted in discussing previous episodes of the series, even while the war was still going on Washington and the other officers running the American army were promising soldiers “Indian land” in areas where there were still self-governing Native nations and which white Americans hadn’t conquered yet. At the same time, The American Revolution also challenged some of my ideas about the history of warfare, especially on the American continent. Some of the fighting forces in the American Revolution on the Patriot side included Black and white troops fighting alongside each other – a distinction that wasn’t repeated again in U.S. history until 1948, when President Harry Truman ordered an end to the segregation of the U.S. military that had required Black soldiers to participate only in all-Black units (under white commanders). The American Revolution was also the first war that involved trench warfare; I’d long assumed that Ulysses S. Grant and his fellow Union commanders in the American Civil War invented trench warfare, but not only were there American commanders in the Revolution who ordered their men to dig trenches, the final victory at Yorktown was achieved in part through two long trenches by which the American forces and their French allies were able to surround the British general, Charles Cornwallis, and force him to surrender.

Overall, The American Revolution was a fascinating program and aired at a particularly fraught time in U.S. history, when the nation is led by a rogue President who longs to be a dictator; the separation-of-powers scheme by which the Framers of the Constitution sought to keep that from happening has almost completely broken down (Trump essentially owns both houses of Congress as well as the Supreme Court, and they meekly do his bidding at least 90 percent of the time); he’s doing the classic dictator thing of ruling by decree through a seemingly unending series of “executive orders”; and by pardoning all the rioters who fought to keep him in power on January 6, 2021 even though he’d lost the 2020 Presidential election (and in some cases pardoning them again for crimes they’ve committed since his last pardon of them), he’s created a cadre of people who’ve already proven themselves willing to commit political violence on his behalf and proclaimed on social media their willingness to do so again. Reason enough that the six Democratic Senators and House members Trump directly threatened have had their security details increased, lest some maniac pro-Trumpers try to do themselves what Trump has so far been unable to do on his own, namely kill his so-called political “enemies.”