Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! (ColdEye Films, BayView Entertainment, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 17) my husband Charles and I watched three quite interesting presentations from Turner Classic Movies: a 2024 documentary called Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! and two “Silent Sunday Showcase” entries both directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! was produced and directed by Peter Flynn and dealt with film collectors, the small subgroup of movie-mad people who obsessively trolled abandoned theatres, wastebaskets and wherever movie industry people might have disposed of films they didn’t think had any more commercial value. Despite the public pronouncements of many people involved in creating the cinema as a technology that they were inventing a means to record motion permanently, film was an unstable medium from the get-go. The reasons why are all too well known to movie geeks like me: the early films were made on a substance called cellulose nitrate, and it is very flammable. Later a more stable acetate base was invented which was called “safety film” because it wasn’t as flammable as nitrate (though it also didn’t produce the beautiful gradations of black and white of nitrate), but it had its own deficiencies. As it decays it starts giving off the odor of vinegar, and often film preservationists have opened a long-forgotten can of film only to find it reeks of vinegar, indicating either that it’s already begun to decay or that it’s so far gone it’s unsalvageable. There are all too many sequences in this film of archivists attempting to unspool a roll of film and finding out it has essentially glued itself to itself over time, rendering it too far gone to be preserved. Ironically, Flynn’s narration hails digitalization as the great savior of the film legacy, but ignores that digital transfers come with their own set of problems. A digital file can become useless if the software with which it was created is abandoned or discontinued, or if there are seemingly minor errors like missing bits in the transfer. This is why, even though the major film studios shoot almost entirely on digital these days, and less than 2 percent of all modern movie theatres are actually equipped to show film, they still transfer their elaborately shot digital productions to film for preservation purposes.

Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is dedicated to one particularly intrepid film preservationist in particular: the late Louis DiCrescenzo, who was particularly interested not only in collecting the films themselves but also the original equipment with which they’d been made and shown. DiCrescenzo, who died in January 2024 just after he was filmed for this documentary, was luckily able to find a younger man, Jeffrey Crooks, whom he could train to run the old equipment and maintain the collection after he passed. Many film collectors aren’t so lucky: their children often don’t see any value in old film – “That’s that crazy stuff my dad was into, which kept him from spending time with me,” they think – and toss it out like so much trash when they inherit. One film collector arranged to donate his archives to the Library of Congress precisely so the collection would be preserved after he was gone. A few names in the film would be familiar, at least to certain kinds of movie geeks, like Ron Furmanek, Rick Prelinger (whose collection became the basis for the movies available on archive.org) and the remarkable Malkames family (whose name is pronounced “Mal-CAMES,” not “Mahl-KAHM–es” as I’d always assumed). Great-grandfather Karl Malkames was one of the cinematographers on D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915). Grandfather Don Malkames (1904-1986) also worked as a cinematographer and shot many of Louis Jordan’s music videos in the 1940’s as well as feature films like Jigsaw (1949), Project X (1949) and The Burglar (1957). Father Karl and son Rick continued the tradition, and Rick has a Web site devoted to his collection – including sound home movies of the Malkames family gathered around a piano taking turns singing and playing.

One of the most interesting running themes of Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is the obsession of one particular collector, Eric Grayson, with restoring one particular film: the 1929 Mascot part-sound serial King of the Kongo. Using surviving 35 mm sources, a 16 mm cut-down print and digital software to clean up flaws in the image quality, Grayson was ultimately able to piece together a complete version of the picture. The sound was another matter, since the film was shot on the Vitaphone system with the sound on a separate disc (a series of 10-minute phonograph records, one per reel). Among Grayson’s problems were that the Vitaphone discs ended up in the hands of record collectors, not film collectors, while the film itself was plundered for stock footage by various people after its initial release. My husband Charles said he hoped that if and when the film is completely restored, there would be some explanation for the lengthy … pauses … in the … talking sequences … between the … actors’ cue lines and … their own. This was quite common in the very earliest sound films, the result of sound engineers who had become the new dictators of Hollywood. They insisted that the only way recorded dialogue could be understood by the audience is if actors delivered their lines slowly and carefully paused between the cue line and the reply. The fact that there had already been plenty of talking records that weren’t made in this hideously unnatural fashion, and which had sold well, was ignored. The few early talkies that are still entertaining were made by directors like King Vidor, Lewis Milestone, William Wyler, Rouben Mamoulian and Frank Capra who overrode the dictates of the sound engineers and told the actors to speak normally, but King of the Kongo’s director, Richard Thorpe (who later went on to a sinecure at MGM and there directed Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock), didn’t have that kind of determination or clout. The one actor in King of the Kongo you’re likely to have heard of, Boris Karloff, actually spoke his lines naturalistically as he did in his later films, but the others acted in that hideously stagy manner prescribed by the sound engineers.

One of the problems with film preservation is that old prints of movies are quite valuable to the people with an interest in them, but not to the rest of the world. Another problem many film collectors faced, especially in the 1970’s, was pressure from the movie studios literally to put them out of business. One collector actually recalled being prosecuted by the FBI and forced to serve a six-month jail sentence after his collection was decreed to be stolen goods and held in violation of the copyright laws. This was especially ironic since most of the items he had had simply been thrown away by the major studios. Later on, with the rise of home video and then DVD’s, the studios finally realized there was gold in them thar archives, and a number of studios literally had to cut deals with the film collectors they’d once tried to put out of business to get important scenes needed to restore old films to their original running times and content. Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is a remarkable documentary about the unsung heroes of film preservation – towards the end Flynn makes a rather kvetchy comment about the fact that when the rediscovered 1922 film Beyond the Rocks, directed by Sam Wood and co-starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, was re-premiered there was a long list of people in the program who’d participated in the restoration but no mention of whoever had owned the print in the first place – and the overall fragility of our audio-visual recorded legacy.

Beyond the Rocks (Paramount, 1922)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In honor of the film preservationists and collectors commemorated in Film Is Dead. Long Live Film!, here is a celebration of one of the most important long-lost silent movies brought back by a preservation archive, Beyond the Rocks, made at Paramount in 1922, directed by Sam Wood and starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino. The note here came from a movie journal entry dated May 27, 2006, probably the day after my husband Charles and I first watched it.

I ran Beyond the Rocks, the film TCM showed last Sunday as part of a seven-film tribute to Rudolph Valentino. This was the one that was rediscovered in 2003 by the Nederlands Filmuseum in the middle of a private collection of old film reels that had been donated to them, and though virtually the whole movie was there (only a couple of minutes seemed to have fallen through the cracks completely) the reels were not together in the collection and the film had to be pieced back together — and some of the reels were not as well preserved as others. There are two sequences badly beset by nitrate burns — one a relatively unimportant shot of a train going through a tunnel and one a much more significant scene at a cocktail party at which the principals meet — but otherwise the film is actually pretty well preserved (certainly we’ve seen worse!) and a welcome rediscovery, especially given that it’s the only film Valentino and Gloria Swanson made together and it was one of the three films whose absence she most lamented in her autobiography (the others were the 1925 film Madame Sans-Gêne and the last reel of her marvelous 1927 production of Sadie Thompson). Swanson recalled that the Fatty Arbuckle and William Desmond Taylor scandals broke just before they were about to start shooting Beyond the Rocks — which had not only the marquee value of the stars’ names (though Swanson got top billing and insisted it was her vehicle; she was already an established star while Valentino, despite having already made The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, was still considered an up-and-comer whose career could be helped by a male lead in a Swanson film) but also that of a superstar writer, Elinor Glyn, known for such racy tales as Three Weeks, His Hour, Her Moment (in his autobiography Charlie Chaplin joked about the shortening time sequence of those titles) and, most famously, It — which from Dorothy Parker’s review seems like an Ayn Rand novel with the politics deleted (the hero is a super-powerful industrialist named John Gaunt) — and the film script she wrote for It which had a totally different plot from the novel (which itself appears in the film as the hot book of the moment which the characters in the movie read and discuss).

As a result, the script by Jack Cunningham (a name which surprised me in the credits; I’d assumed Glyn had adapted the novel herself) had to be rewritten at the last minute and much of the romantic heavy-breathing between the leads discarded, while according to Robert Osborne’s intro there were actually two versions of each kissing scene: a short one for the U.S. release (since one of the first edicts Will Hays had rendered as Hollywood’s morals czar was that a kiss could last only a few seconds on screen) and a longer one for Europe — though even in this European print the romantic scenes still seemed a bit on the short side and hardly the heavy-breathing romantic fireworks one would have expected from these two iconic stars in their only on-screen teaming. Beyond the Rocks is a heavily contrived story that moves its characters willy-nilly around the world to surprisingly little effect (this is the most peripatetic movie I can think of other than the Beatles’ Help!). It starts in a fishing village off the coast of England, where Captain Fitzgerald (Alec Francis) is living in a genteelly poor retirement. He and his two homely daughters (“products of a misalliance in his youth,” the title explains), played by Mary Foy and Adele Watson, are counting on his beautiful daughter Theodora (Gloria Swanson) to marry a rich man and thereby restore the family’s fortunes.

On a boat trip around the coast Theodora’s boat capsizes and she’s saved from drowning by Lord Hector Bracondale (Rudolph Valentino) — a title explains that he had an Italian grandmother to explain Valentino’s exotic and decidedly un-English appearance in the role. Of course, they’re smitten with each other at first sight, and he’s charming, drop-dead gorgeous and filthy rich — so what more could Our Theodora want? But she’s put off considering him as a mate any further by a chance remark by a female member of his entourage that he’s “not the marrying kind,” and instead Theodora goes through with the marriage her dad has arranged for her with self-made millionaire Josiah Brown (Robert Bolder, a fireplug-shaped actor with a striking resemblance to Louis B. Mayer — Gloria Swanson was only five feet tall and Bolder looks just an inch or two taller in their scenes together) even though she endures the ceremony with a fixed expression on her face that makes it look like she’s going to puke at any moment. The not-so-happy couple head to Switzerland for their honeymoon and Theodora wants to go climb the Alps — only Josiah, the spoilsport, decided that just getting to their hotel was exercise enough and he bails on the trip. She loses her footing at the edge of a crevasse (Gloria Swanson always prided herself on doing her own stunts and probably did so here, though the “mountain” is all too obviously a papier-mâché construction on the Paramount backlot and she’d have only had a few feet to fall) and is dangling by a rope when in comes Hector to save her life again, though since the rope is too heavy to be pulled with both of them on it he first has the two of them lowered to the nearest ledge to await rescue, which gives them plenty of time to vibrate with mutual affection.

From there the film flits to Paris, where the two meet at the palace of Versailles (whose exterior is pretty obviously a painted backdrop, perhaps painted over a blown-up photo of the original à la Black Narcissus) and there’s a DeMille-like flashback to the glory days of the ancien regime in which Valentino and Swanson appear as forbidden lovers then. (It’s indicative of how ill at ease Valentino always seemed in stories set in his own time that here, and during a later scene also set in the past with he and Swanson romancing each other in the guise of an historical couple, his performance takes on a smoldering quality it pretty much lacks in the bulk of the film.) Then it goes to England again, where a pageant is being staged on the grounds of a major estate and Hector locks the man who’s supposed to play Theodora’s lover in a closet so he can take the part himself. Theodora, torn between duty to her husband and attraction to her lover, decides to write them both — telling Josiah she intends to join him in London and resume their marriage, and telling Hector she can’t see him again — only yet another of the omnipresent feminine busybodies who populate the dramatis personae steams open the letters so she can read them, then puts them back in the wrong envelopes. When Hector reads Josiah’s letter and realizes what’s happened, he drives to London to intercept the other letter before Josiah can read it — only he arrives too late. Broken by his wife’s apparent infidelity (though the filmmakers have played the usual games with us in leaving it open as to whether anything carnal ever did happen between Hector and Theodora), Josiah decides to accept the offer of a friend to join him on an archaeological expedition to the Sahara despite Hector’s warning of the danger from desert tribes. (I couldn’t help but joke, “I’m Rudolph Valentino, damnit! I know something about desert tribes!”) Josiah — who given that he couldn’t handle even a simple mountaineering trip in the Alps would seem to be an unlikely candidate for desert archaeology (in, you guessed it, recycled sets from The Sheik) — duly gets killed in the inevitable desert-tribe attack until a force from the local colonial government arrives and restores order, and on his deathbed Josiah blesses the union of Theodora and Hector. The final scene takes us back to the coast of England and Hector’s yacht, on which he and Theodora are traveling and he says they have made it beyond the rocks of their early relationship and found safe harbor with each other (the only explanation of this film’s title we’re ever going to get). The End.

As silly and improbable as this story is, Beyond the Rocks has one thing going for it big-time: the direction by Sam Wood. In terms of camera setups it’s pretty unadventurous — there are so few closeups it’s all too apparent how short Gloria Swanson really was (anyone who first saw her in Sunset Boulevard — where Billy Wilder had John F. Seitz shoot her almost always from below, while shooting down on William Holden from above, so she appeared to tower over him even though he was really a foot taller — will inevitably be jarred by earlier films that reveal her truly diminutive stature) — but he manages to get some of the most marvelously understated performances of the silent era from his cast. There are almost none of the statuesque poses, the hammy hands-on-forehead gestures, or the registrations of disgust by hurling oneself to the ground and making one look like a building that’s just collapsed in an earthquake. Instead the actors behave surprisingly naturalistically — much of this film looks more like a talkie with the sound turned off than a silent film — making their points with a minimum of gesturing. This film underscores Gloria Swanson’s contention in her autobiography that the prestige films of the silent era always had fully written-out scripts and the actors recited their dialogue from memory, and the only change when sound came in was that now there were microphones and recording machines capturing the lines they’d been speaking all along. Wood’s direction plays against the melodrama of Glyn’s plot, especially in the finest scene in the film (ironically, one Swanson isn’t in): the confrontation between Josiah and Hector. Robert Bolder, who previously throughout the film has been an almost comic character, takes on a true sense of dignity as his reactions switch from anger (he’s ready to kill Hector) to real-looking tears to sorrow to resignation; and Valentino also plays the scene with dignity and an appreciation of the impossible situation all three of these people are in. In this scene, more than any other in the movie, Beyond the Rocks breaks through the contrivance of its plot and the last-minute moral compromises the filmmakers had to make and achieves a startlingly intimate depth of emotion.

Three Women (Warner Brothers, 1924)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Film Is Dead. Long Live Film!, TCM showed a couple of odd silent movies directed by Ernst Lubitsch: a 1924 comedy/melodrama from Warner Bros. called Three Women and a 1919 comedy/fantasy from his early years in Germany called The Doll. Three Women is a typical silent film about a no-good rotter named Edmund Lamont (Lew Cody, a specialist in these sorts of roles) who, as the title suggests, romances three women. One is middle-aged wealthy heiress Mabel Wilton (Pauline Frederick, one of the veteran Broadway actresses who got wooed into the movies by Goldwyn Pictures, which jocularly earned it the nickname “The Old Ladies’ Home”); one is her daughter Jeannie (May McAvoy, who three years later would play Al Jolson’s girlfriend in The Jazz Singer); and one is an anonymous bimbo named Harriet (Marie Prevost). We know right off the bat that Edmund is up to no good partly because of his thin little “roo” moustache, and partly because a heavy-set man named Harvey Craig (Willard Louis) is dogging Edmund for money he owes him. Edmund and Mabel meet at a charity ball at which Edmund is throwing around money he doesn’t have, and after he and Mabel literally bump into each other, Harvey points out that Mabel has a lot of money ($3 million, to be exact), and if Edmund romances her he can get the money he needs to pay his debt to Harvey and everyone else to whom he owes funds. Soon Mabel is inviting Edmund to her home, lighting incense in an elaborate sitting room and preparing to canoodle with him – while Jeannie, ostensibly a student at UC Berkeley (though there’s a major geographical glitch here: when we see her get on a train called the “Los Angeles Express” to visit her mom in New York, the train station from which she boards is clearly labeled “San Bernardino”), is getting restive. She’s surrounded by a lot of men, but the one who truly loves her is medical student Fred Colman (Pierre Gendron), who is broke but expects to be making a lot of money once he becomes a doctor. Fred hocks his watch to get the money to buy Jeannie a bracelet for her 18th birthday, but then gets aced when her mom sends her either the exact same bracelet or an even fancier one.

When Jeannie finally arrives in New York and moves in with her mom, Mabel is spending so much time with Edmund that Jeannie literally never sees her; she’s palmed off with soup for her dinner while Edmund and Mabel are dining out, and she complains that she’s lonelier at home than she ever was on campus (though since she was surrounded by people during the campus scenes, that’s all too easy to believe!). Edmund happens to meet Jeannie and starts a flirtation with her without knowing Mabel is her mother, and ultimately Edmund actually gets Jeannie to marry him after he finds out that she has her own money, an inheritance from her late father. Unfortunately, the point at which Edmond and Jeannie get hitched legally is the point at which Three Women abandons the path of light romantic comedy at which Lubitsch was best and turns into all too typical silent-era melodrama. Fred Colman shows up and announces that he’s got an internship in New York and wants to start dating Jeannie again – and he’s understandably miffed when he finds out Jeannie is actually married to someone else. Mom is also miffed, especially when she learns that Edmund is actually seeing the titular third woman, Harriet, at a typically preposterous 1920’s establishment called the Monkey Club. The reason it’s named that is the patrons are given papier-maché monkeys on stalks that they can manipulate. Mabel demands that Edmund give up Jeannie, but Edmund threatens to release Mabel’s love letters to him if she pushes it, which will embarrass her in a scandal. So Mabel, in Jeannie’s presence, pulls a gun on Edmund and shoots him, then tells Jeannie, “You’re free.” Jeannie takes the love letters with which Edmund was threatening to blackmail them, tears them up and throws them in the fire. Mabel is put on trial for Edmund’s murder but is acquitted, and she, Jeannie and Fred Colman end up together at the end.

Three Women was one of the projects on which Lubitsch worked with writer Hans Kräly, his working partner in Germany, whom he insisted on bringing with him when he emigrated from Germany to the U.S. Lubitsch was brought to the U.S. by Mary Pickford to direct Rosita (1923), which cast her as an innocent Spanish dancer torn between a lecherous king and the man who really loves her. Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart keeps insisting that Rosita was a major hit even though all other sources I’ve read say it was one of Pickford’s few flops, and it was a big enough career embarrassment it was one of the few Pickford films she did not bother to save in her archives. (The extant print was discovered in Russia.) Lubitsch stayed in Hollywood but ended up under contract to Warner Brothers (back when they were still spelling out the word “Brothers” instead of abbreviating it “Bros.”) when they were still a second-tier studio. Lubitsch’s films at Warners got better as his tenure there progressed, and by the end of the 1920’s he was under contract to the most prestigious studio at the time, Paramount, making films that reflected his unique brand of saucy romantic comedy with the so-called “Lubitsch touches.” Alas, his working relationship with Hans Kräly (with whom he seemed to have the sort of partnership that Dudley Nichols had with John Ford, Robert Riskin with Frank Capra, and Charles Bennett with Alfred Hitchcock) ended abruptly when he caught Kräly having an affair with Mrs. Lubitsch, and rather than react with the aw-what-the-hell detachment of a Lubitsch character, Lubitsch had a jealous hissy-fit and banned Kräly from his future projects. More’s the pity, I say, though one imdb.com reviewer called Kräly “a drag on Lubitsch.”

The Doll (Projektions-AG Union, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft [UFA], 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The other Ernst Lubitsch film Turner Classic Movies showed November 17 was The Doll (1919), made while Lubitsch was still in Germany. It’s a rather arch tale about a young man, Lancelot von Chauterelle (Hermann Thimig), whose uncle, Baron von Chauterelle (Max Kronert), is getting worried that he doesn’t have an heir and the Chauterelle name will die out if his nephew doesn’t hurry up, marry a woman and produce some kids already. “I won’t marry a woman!” Lancelot insists, in a scene that makes it look (at least to a 2024 audience) as if he’s about to come out as Gay. Instead he seeks out the home of renowned toymaker Hilarius (Victor Janson), who after years of making dolls in normal sizes has just perfected a life-size replica of his daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda), complete with a wind-up crank and a series of button controls on its back. Lancelot hears about Hilarius’s invention and thinks it’s the perfect solution: he’ll buy the doll, go through a mock marriage ceremony with it, get the 300,000-franc dowry his uncle is offering him once he’s married, and then he’ll donate the money to the local monastery and live out his days as a monk. Only Hilarius’s apprentice (Gerhard Rittenband) breaks the arm of the replica Ossi and the real Ossi agrees to take its place just as long as Lancelot visits and wants a life-sized doll. Both Charles and I thought this was going to be a 20-minute comedy short, but it stretched out to over an hour and the one joke really couldn’t sustain it – though even in a film this early there are typical Lubitsch “touches,” like the scene in which the genuinely human guests at Lancelot’s and Ossi’s wedding move as mechanically as the dolls in the sequences at Hilarius’s workshop.

But it’s a one-joke movie and the one joke pretty quickly wears out its welcome, despite some nice scenes back at the monastery in which Ossi gets worried that the monks plan to lock her inside their junk room. There’s also a prologue in which a puppeteer (the film’s German title is Der Puppe, which can mean either “the doll” or “the puppet”) played by Ernst Lubitsch himself sets up a doll house and puts up various sets and props around it, which seems to suggest that the entire story is a fantasy and all the characters are dolls. For some reason, at least according to Jacqueline Stewart, Lubitsch regarded The Doll as one of his best films and frequently cited it, along with two other German comedies, among his greatest works. Far be it from me to disagree with the great Lubitsch, but The Doll strikes me – in spite of some truly inspired moments – as a pretty leaden would-be farce with an overall heaviness typical of German attempts at humor. (It reminded me of a line from one of the old BBC Goon Squad radio shows, which launched Peter Sellers on his career and were basically Monty Python before Monty Python, in which Sellers said in his best comic-German accent, “Who said ve Germans haff no sense of humor?,” and a chorus of voices replied, “Just about everybody.”) The credits list 19th century author E. T. A. Hoffmann as the source for the original story, though I suspect Lubitsch and co-writer Hans Kräly took little from Hoffmann except the basic concept of a life-sized doll that successfully impersonates a human being. The imdb.com page also lists A. E. Willner as composer of an operetta based on the tale, though of course the greatest musical adaptation of the mechanical-doll storyline is the “Olympia” act of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which has everything this rather leaden film lacks: genuine wit, subtlety, humor and even pathos. There’s one interesting name on the behind-the-camera credits for The Doll: the cinematographers are Theodor Sparkühl and Kurt Waschneck, and like a lot of German Jews in the movie business, Sparkühl emigrated after Hitler and the Nazis took power in 1933, moving first to France (where he was billed as Théodore Sparkuhl) and then to the U.S. (where he was Theodore Sparkuhl, no accents and no umlauts), where he settled at Paramount and shot some of the most important early-1940’s films noir.

The Big Combo (Security Pictures, Theodora Productions, Allied Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 16) my husband Charles and I watched an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of a quite interesting gangster movie with film noir elements from 1955: The Big Combo, made under auspices that reflected the breakdown of the traditional Hollywood studio system in the early 1950’s and its replacement by ad hoc combinations of “production companies,” many of them owned or co-owned by star actors. This one was from two companies called “Security Pictures” and “Theodora Productions,” “Theodora” being the company created by actor Cornel Wilde to make his own movies in association with distributors. In this case the distributor was Allied Artists, formerly our old friends Monogram Pictures until in 1947 they changed their name and started moving up in the cinematic hierarchy. In 1955 Steve Broidy, long-time head of Allied nèe Monogram, announced that he had signed William Wyler, Billy Wilder and John Huston to make prestige pictures for the company – and its stock price immediately went down because, as Wilder biographer Maurice Zolotow explained, his investors realized that “A” productions were a considerably riskier investment than the “B” movies that had previously sustained the studio and given it a source of steady income. (Wyler made Friendly Persuasion, Wilder Love in the Afternoon, and Huston signed to make Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart – only by the time Huston finally got around to making The Man Who Would Be King, it was 20 years later, Gable and Bogart were both dead, and the stars were Sean Connery and Michael Caine.)

The Big Combo was originally planned as at least a semi-prestige film called The Hoodlum, to be shot in color with Spencer Tracy and Jack Palance as stars and Hugo Fregonese directing from a script by – or at least attributed to – Philip Yordan. There’s some question as to just who actually wrote this film because Yordan was making a handsome living working as a “front” for blacklisted writers, and according to Eddie Muller the actual author of this script was Ben Maddow, who had made his name in Hollywood writing the script for John Huston’s 1950 noir classic The Asphalt Jungle. Maddow’s imdb.com biography page includes a quote from him about Yordan: “Philip Yordan has never written more than a sentence in his life. He’s incapable of writing.” (Yet Yordan has a pretty impressive pre-blacklist credits list, including When Strangers Marry, the 1945 Dillinger, Whistle Stop, Suspense and The Chase.) Whoever came up with it, The Big Combo is a quite good gangster/noir film centered around the rivalry of two main characters, police lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) and gang boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte, who joined the cast four days into the shoot after Jack Palance pulled out of the project out of anger that they wouldn’t let his wife play the female lead). The director, Joseph H. Lewis, was called in at the last moment just two days before shooting was supposed to begin. Fortunately he had the great noir cinematographer John Alton on the project, and Alton used his trademark skill of shooting fast and well on a low budget throughout the movie. Also, whoever wrote the script (Yordan, Maddow or both), The Big Combo has some fascinatingly multidimensional characterizations, especially among the three principal women.

It’s also one of those movies in which the lead crook is in some ways more sympathetic than the lead cop: Lt. Diamond is arrogant, self-righteous and generally a pain in the ass, while Mr. Brown (Richard Conte gives the performance of his life; he’s still a crook but a far savvier and more sophisticated one than the hoods he usually played) is suave, sophisticated and skilled at maintaining a front of respectability even though he’s the Big Boss of crime in that city and the dialogue explaining the reach of his power sounds a lot like Sherlock Holmes talking about Professor Moriarty to me. (Frankly, Richard Conte plays the part considerably better than Jack Palance would have; Palance was a first-rate actor as a figure of stylized menace but couldn’t have pulled off the character’s surface suavity as well as Conte.) As for the women, Jean Wallace (then, and until they divorced in 1982, Mrs. Cornel Wilde) is superb as Susan Lowell, a former aspiring concert pianist who gave up her career to pair up with Mr. Brown and who lets him push her around out of self-loathing. Also, Lt. Diamond is attracted to her – even though he’s already got a girlfriend (more on her later) – thereby setting up one of those hero-heroine-villain love triangles that powered many of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films. The woman already in Lt. Diamond’s life is a stripper named Rita (Helene Stanton) whom he sees regularly after she finishes her nightly shows, only she gets eliminated when Mr. Brown sends a pair of hired killers, Mingo (Earl Holliman) and Fante (future spaghetti-Western star Lee Van Cleef), over to Lt. Diamond’s apartment to kill him – only she’s let herself in with his key and they kill her instead.

There’s a third woman in the dramatis personae: Alicia Brown (Helen Walker in her final film; before this she’d been in some major mid-1940’s noirs including Nightmare Alley, Call Northside 777 and Impact), Mr. Brown’s estranged wife. Her presence in the story is part of an elaborate set of cons Mr. Brown has pulled to make it look like she ran off with a gangster named Grazzi (whom we never see except in an old still photo) and later was killed. Only it turns out that Mr. Brown’s agents killed Grazzi on a steamship that was supposedly taking him home to Sicily and threw his body overboard, then made it look like Alicia was dead instead of Grazzi when in fact she’s alive in a New York state nursing home obsessively tending a stand of flowers she’s grown. Lt. Diamond traces her there and arrests her in order to force her to testify against Mr. Brown, which she’s initially reluctant to do but ultimately agrees. There are some quite chilling scenes in The Big Combo that definitely pushed the envelope of the sorts of violence usually permitted under the Motion Picture Production Code, including a scene in which Lt. Diamond is held hostage by Mr. Brown and his thugs and is force-fed an alcoholic beverage – it looks like he’s being waterboarded, only with booze – and a great scene in which Mr. Brown’s assistant, Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy), tries to get Mingo and Fante to kill Mr. Brown – only they kill McClure instead. The gimmick relies on the fact that McClure, who used to run the rackets Brown now controls, is nearly deaf and relies on a hearing aid, and just before Mingo and Fante turn their guns on him, Mr. Brown unplugs McClure’s hearing aid. Lewis stages the scene of McClure’s murder totally soundlessly, with the guns blasting away but without making noise.

The Big Combo is also unusual in that the hired killers are portrayed more or less as a Gay couple, though this wasn’t as innovative as Eddie Muller seemed to think it was; eight years earlier, in an RKO “B” noir called Born to Kill, Lawrence Tierney and Elisha Cook, Jr. had similarly been portrayed as a criminal couple with Gay undertones. There are also bits that dramatize Susan Lowell’s disquiet with her current status as Mr. Brown’s moll and her yearnings for her old life as an aspiring concert pianist. In one scene she picks up an older man named Audubon (Roy Gordon) for a dance in a nightclub, and as she’s in his arms she collapses and later explains she’s O.D.’d on pills as a way of committing suicide. (This was apparently inspired by Jean Wallace’s two real-life suicide attempts in 1946 and 1949, while she was married to actor Franchot Tone.) Then we see her at home playing a record of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp minor by pianist Jakob Gimpel (whose Vox album of Chopin selections I remember having as a child), only Mr. Brown comes home unexpectedly and makes her stop the record. In an even later scene we get to see Gimpel as himself playing the same Chopin piece as part of a live concert Susan attends, though she’s overcome with disgust and leaves the concert early. The film’s climax takes place at an airport where Mr. Brown is waiting in vain for a pilot to bring his private plane and fly him out of the country – only the pilot doesn’t show (he’s previously been arrested by Lt. Diamond’s men) and the cops do instead, taking Mr. Brown into custody for a presumed trial with Susan and Alicia as the key witnesses against him.

The original plan was actually to shoot this at an airport à la Casablanca, but John Alton had a better idea. He said he could shoot the entire thing on a soundstage, with just shadows and pin lights. Since the airplane never shows up, Alton didn’t think they needed to budget the rental for a real plane. Instead they created the effect with shadows and spotlights alone, and the climax of the scene comes when Susan, showing that her loyalties have changed and she’s now on the side of good, grabs hold of a spotlight attached to one of the cars in the scene and uses it to point the police to just where Mr. Brown is so they can aim at him. Charles and I had seen The Big Combo once before in the 1990’s on the UCSD channel, though in a far inferior print that was cut down to the old 4:3 aspect ratio, but this time around I liked it a lot better. It’s generally acknowledged as Lewis’s second-best film (after his audacious 1949 masterpiece, Gun Crazy) and it’s certainly one of the better movies from the tail end of the first film noir cycle. It’s also noteworthy for the jazz background score by David Raksin (composer of the 1944 Laura), featuring Shorty Rogers and His Giants, one of the top white L.A. jazz bands of the time. Producer Sidney Harmon and director Lewis deserve kudos for not slapping another generic mittel-European score on this one and using the music its characters would have listened to instead – anticipating Henry Mancini’s use of a jazz score for the noir TV series Peter Gunn by two years.

Death in Paradise: Episode 13.7 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 15) I watched another episode of the TV series Death in Paradise, set on the fictional Caribbean island of Sainte-Marie (“played” by the very real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe) – though in this case the police are split between Sainte-Marie and the equally fictitious Saint-Antoine, where a group of young women who all attended a prestigious boarding school in Britain are spending a summer. One of them, Cressida “Chris” Dempsey (Django Chan-Reeves), is an utterly obnoxious “influencer” who spends most of her time talking on her smart phone, filming everything she does and sees as she does and sees it for a vlog (a video Web log, for those of you who aren’t up to the latest digital-world terminology) and making herself utterly obnoxious to everyone in her group. Another young woman, Abigail Warner (Eve Ponsonby), is found dead in a hotel swimming pool. The death is at first ruled an accident, but detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson) is suspicious because Abigail had just been swimming in the ocean before she was found dead in the pool, and why after having swum in the ocean would she want to swim again so soon? The Sainte-Marie police have to investigate this because Saint-Antoine is too small an island, with too limited a population, to have a police force of its own. Ultimately, to almost no one’s surprise, Chris turns out to be Abigail’s killer. Apparently there’s some deep, dark secret in Chris’s past – though I don’t think writer James Hall bothered to reveal what it was or why it would be so potentially destructive to Abigail or her direct, no-nonsense blog persona, but it was, and after a brief struggle in which Abigail confronted Chris in the pool (and writer James Hall gave her a scar on her forehead the cops never seemed to figure out what was up with that), it was Chris who knocked off Abigail instead so she didn’t reveal what she was going to reveal about her online. I was comparatively bored by this one and I did a fair amount of nodding off during it, but I got the gist of it even though for once the subplots on this show – including a former member of a witness protection program who’d testified against some criminal bigwigs on Sainte-Marie and had to spend years on a neighboring island until the charges in her case got resolved – were more interesting than the main intrigue.

Live at the Belly Up: The Charities (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Death in Paradise I watched a quite good Live at the Belly Up show shot in 2024 at the eponymous club and concert venue in Solana Beach (which is why I’ve never been there: I’m sure I’d like a lot of the music played there, but the transportation difficulties are just insurmountable). The band was a white neo-soul group called The Charities, led by a kind of dorky heavy-set dude named Brock Van Pelt (by coincidence, “Van Pelt” is also the last name of Lucy and Linus in the Peanuts comic strip). Van Pelt is the group’s front person and also was the spokesperson for it in the interstitial interviews. He said that The Charities came together from people who had worked in various bands and wanted to continue their musical careers. A Web site at “Jam in the Van” (https://jaminthevan.com/band/the-charities/) identifies them as “six brothers,” but there are only five of them (or at least that’s how many there were on Live at the Belly Up) and they have multiple last names and radically different appearances, so “brothers” is probably purely metaphorical. The Jam in the Van Web site says, “The exchange of energy between the audience and the band builds into an experience that cannot be expressed in the studio. That is not to imply any distaste for the recording process, however. Wherever they have found themselves dwelling, they have built their own recording studio and utilized their collection of analog equipment to capture their musical adventures. Their latest studio work and first official album, GBLO (Get Blasted, Listen to Oldies), came out of their home studio just outside San Luis Obispo, CA. The good times with The Charities are only just beginning!” Unfortunately, that “album” doesn’t seem to be available on physical media – though they have issued a 45 rpm single. “Bring Your Love” b/w “Angel Eyes,” on Nu-Tone, one of the labels issued by Penrose Records, an intriguing enterprise affiliated with Dap-Tone which I ran into on a recent church convocation in Riverside with my husband Charles. (They played both songs on last night’s Live at the Belly Up program.)

Van Pelt explained in the interview segments that he was originally involved in hip-hop (the euphemism for rap by people who actually like it), only as he explored that genre he got interested in the origins of some of the beats rap D.J.’s “sample” for their songs. Accordingly he started exploring 1960’s soul records in his mother’s collection, and ultimately came up with an infectious band sound that’s at its best when it’s reproducing the quieter, gentler ballad-soul styles of the 1960’s. They opened with “Angel Eyes,” in which Van Pelt sang a falsetto lead (the contrast between his falsetto singing voice and his lower-lying speaking voice in the interviews is dramatic) and soared eloquently over his band. Van Pelt and The Charities stayed in ballad-soul mode with “Can’t Own Love” and “Get Back, Don’t Stop,” though on the latter song they got a bit funkier. Then it was back to balladry with “Movin’ On,” “Comin’ Right Back” (featuring a vocal by their keyboard player,. Mike Butler), “Call for You” and their recent single release, “Bring Your Love.” After “It’s Not Our Time” they got more energetic with “The Plug,” featuring the kind of chicken-scratch guitar by Sage Provins (easily the band’s most physically attractive member) I remember vividly from innumerable local soul bands in the Berkeley-Oakland area in the mid-1970’s. The Charities then kept up the dance grooves with “Mistakes” – a great song in which Van Pelt lamented all the nights he’d partied too heartily – and a medley of “Sugar Sweet” and “Do the Right Thing” before their closing number, “Funk Upon a Time,” which intriguingly opened with “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt and created a nice, laid-back dance groove (even though from what I’ve seen of the Belly Up on this show, it’s too crowded to serve as a good dance venue). I quite liked The Charities, though it’s a regrettable sign of the times that almost none of their music can be had on physical media. G.L.B.O. is available only as a download or a stream from Amazon.com and presumably other sources, and it doesn’t contain any of the songs they did on Live at the Belly Up anyway. During the show, instead of promoting a physical CD or LP, Van Pelt kept urging his audience to look up his band’s music on Spotify!