Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of "Blackmail" (StudioCanal Films, Nedland Media, Turner Classic Movies, 2024)

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

Last night (Wednesday, January 15) Turner Classic Movies aired a 2024 documentary called Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail, followed by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 Blackmail itself. Blackmail began as a 1928 play by Charles Bennett, who was given rather short shrift in the documentary (as he’s been in most Hitchcock biographies) even though he worked on six of Hitchcock’s films (the 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage and Young and Innocent in Britain and Foreign Correspondent in the U.S.) and was essentially to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra. Bennett and Riskin had one intriguing thing in common: they both first connected with their superstar directors when the filmmaker made a movie based on one of their plays (Riskin’s first interface with Capra was when Capra filmed one of Riskin’s plays, Bless You, Sister, retitling it The Miracle Woman) a few years before they actually worked together. Blackmail the play premiered at the Globe Theatre on the West End of London on February 28, 1928 as a vehicle for American actress Tallulah Bankhead (who would later star in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in 1944). Directed by Raymond Massey (who was far better known as an actor), it ran for only 39 performances and was Bankhead’s biggest London flop. But British International Pictures bought the movie rights and assigned it to their top director, Alfred Hitchcock, whom they’d lured from Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Pictures a year before. Hitchcock shot Blackmail as a silent film and then the talkie revolution arrived in Britain two years after it had started in America. Becoming Hitchcock’s writer-director, Laurent Bouzereau, did some interesting split-screen juxtapositions between the silent and sound versions, notably in the key scene in which heroine Alice White (Anny Ondra, voiced in the sound version by Joan Barry for reasons which shall be explained later), after a quarrel with her police-detective boyfriend Frank Webber (John Longdon), goes off with another man, a painter named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard), fights off his attempted seduction and ultimately stabs him with a bread knife, killing him in self-defense.

Bouzereau’s main argument in Becoming Hitchcock is that a lot of the scenes in Hitchcock’s later and far better known films originated in Blackmail, including a hero-heroine-villain love triangle as well as specific scenes, among them Hitchcock’s scene on a subway train in which an obnoxious child is literally trying to pull Hitchcock’s hat over his eyes. It’s not widely known, but in his British years Hitchcock only rarely did walk-on appearances in his own movies; it wasn’t until he came to America in 1939 and made his first U.S. film, Rebecca, in 1940 that he established his tradition of doing a cameo in each and every film he made. Becoming Hitchcock also explores various running themes in Hitchcock’s work, including his interest in food (Hitchcock’s father was a London grocer, and anyone looking at Hitchcock’s physical dimensions would readily conclude that food was very important to him), his setting climaxes at historical landmarks (the British Museum here, later the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore), and his use of special effects. This was something Hitchcock actually learned from his apprenticeship in Germany in the early 1920’s; Michael Balcon’s company had formed a co-production deal with a German studio called Emelka, under which Hitchcock made his first two films as a full-fledged director, The Pleasure Garden (1925) and the now-lost The Mountain Eagle a.k.a. Fear O’God (1926). While working in Germany he got to see the UFA Studios, the best-equipped in Europe, and watch Fritz Lang and Friedrich W. Murnau shoot their early masterpieces. Hitchcock remembered Murnau shooting a scene for The Last Laugh in a railroad station with a row of trains behind the main actors. Both the front train and the train all the way in back were real, with people getting on and off them, but the trains in between were all miniatures, built in perspective. Murnau invited Hitchcock to look through the viewfinder, through which Hitchcock saw people getting on and off the front train, people getting on and off the back train, and he noted the eye blended the row of trains together so they all looked real. Murnau told Hitchcock, “It doesn’t matter what you see on the set. All that matters is what the camera sees” – which Hitchcock said was the best advice he ever got on directing. Hitchcock also had been at UFA while Lang was shooting Die Nibelungen and was using the process-screen technology developed by his effects person, Eugen Schufftan, to create the broad vistas of that epic story.

When Hitchcock learned that he couldn’t shoot his big climax inside the real British Museum because the available light wasn’t strong enough and the museum’s exhibition rooms were too crowded to allow him to bring in lights, he decided to use Schufftan’s technology to recreate it in the studio. Worried that John Maxwell, British International’s production chief, would veto use of the Schufftan technology if he found out about it, Hitchcock had a dummy crew shooting an insert of a letter supposedly written by Alice confessing to Crewe’s murder while he did the scenes in which the big head of one of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs was patched in to the overall image via Schufftan’s process screen. (There’s an unintended irony in that the British Museum’s collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts was looted from Egypt while it was a British “protectorate,” and the Egyptian government is still futilely trying to get it all back: an interesting subtext for a film whose plot is based so strongly on crime and deceit.) Becoming Hitchcock has had three reviews on imdb.com so far, and two of them have been scathing towards its unseen host/narrator, African-American film critic Elvis Mitchell. One reviewer almost came out and called Mitchell a DEI hire: “I'd like to say that it's anyone's guess how Mitchell became a known personality ... but I think we all know the reason why – It certainly wasn't because of his insight, intelligence, or excitement.” Another reviewer said, “[T]he narration drove me to imdb to check whether it was generated by AI. Who talks like this? Apparently, Elvis Mitchell does. He speaks like he’s inserting random commas and periods in sentences. Very distracting. He’s also a monotone.” At least one particular in Mitchell’s narration drove me up the wall: his repeated references to Donald Calthorp, the actor who played Tracy the blackmailer, as “Calthrop.” He also claims Calthorp was primarily a stage actor who made very few films – yet imdb.com lists 64 film credits for Calthorp, including the posthumously released film of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (made in 1940, the year Calthorp died, but not released until 1941), and he’s particularly good as mad scientist Boris Karloff’s embittered disabled assistant in the 1936 British film The Man Who Changed His Mind (retitled The Man Who Lived Again for its American release).

Despite Mitchell’s problematic narration, Becoming Hitchcock scores points with me for including some odd and rare footage, including the sound test Hitchcock shot with Anny Ondra before deciding that her German accent made her totally unbelievable as a British shopgirl. So he reshot her scenes for the sound version in a manner similar to the ending of Singin’ in the Rain: he had British actress Joan Barry stand just off-camera with a microphone and Ondra lip-synched to Barry’s line readings. John Longden and Cyril Ritchard were interviewed in later years, and both recalled getting aches in their necks from having to move about on the set with their heads turned to face the concealed mikes, wherever they were, since this was made before the mike boom was invented (by Dorothy Arzner for Clara Bow’s first talkie, The Wild Party, in 1929). Becoming Hitchcock is a fascinating look at an early work by someone who’s often considered the greatest movie director of all time (not by me, though; if I had to pick a “greatest director of all time” it would be Fritz Lang) and how its images and techniques filtered down to his later, better-known masterpieces.

Blackmail (sound version) (British International Pictures, 1929)

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

After Becoming Hitchcock on January 15 Turner Classic Movies showed the film that the documentary claimed was the source for much of Alfred Hitchcock’s later greatness: Blackmail (1929), his 10th completed feature and first film with sound. Blackmail began as a play by Charles Bennett in 1928 which was produced in London but ran for only 39 performances despite – or maybe because of – its star, American actress Tallulah Bankhead (whom it’s difficult to imagine as a British shopgirl who was picked up by a shady artist, repelled by his advances and ultimately killed him in self-defense). British International Pictures bought the movie rights to Blackmail and assigned it to Alfred Hitchcock, who was already one of the two most highly regarded directors in Britain (Robert Stevenson was the other). Hitchcock shot Blackmail as a silent movie, casting part-German, part-Czech actress Anny Ondra as the female lead, Alice White; John Longden as her boyfriend, Scotland Yard police detective Frank Webber; Cyril Ritchard as Crewe, the artist who picks Alice up, takes her back to his place, tries to rape her and gets killed by Alice in self-defense; and Donald Calthorp as Tracy, the blackmailer. Then British International production chief John Maxwell (whom Hitchcock couldn’t stand) called Hitchcock into his office and announced that the studio had just acquired sound equipment from the American company RCA. Maxwell ordered Hitchcock to concoct some sound sequences for Blackmail so it could be released as a part-talking film. Hitchcock had other ideas; he wanted to reshoot enough of Blackmail so it would qualify as an all-talking film. Actually, long stretches of the “sound” version of Blackmail were simply carried over from the silent version, fortified with dubbed-in music, sound effects and the sorts of “wild” voices, not definitively identified with any specific actor, that were frequently stuck onto films originally shot silent in the early days of the transition. There isn’t a single word of dialogue linked to an on-screen cast member until about 10 minutes into this 85-minute movie.

Ironically, the most powerful moments in Blackmail are the ones shot silent: Alice’s nocturnal walk through the streets of London after she’s killed Crewe, with the light-hearted song of seduction he sang her turned into a dirge (the song is called “Miss Up-to-Date” and represents Crewe’s assumption that Alice is a modern, sexually liberated woman instead of the innocent virgin she is, a mistake which is literally fatal to him) and the final chase scene through the British Museum. Blackmail is also full of devices Hitchcock used throughout his career, including the hero-heroine-villain love triangle (used again in such later Hitchcocks as The Secret Agent, 1936; Notorious, 1946; and North by Northwest, 1959); the shared guilt of Alice and Frank as he withholds the evidence (Alice’s missing glove, “planted” in an earlier scene in which Alice loses the glove in a restaurant and Frank retrieves it; later he discovers the glove in Crewe’s apartment as one of the cops investigating the murder but pockets it rather than turning it over; in a way Blackmail is The Maltese Falcon in reverse: the detective protests his killer girlfriend instead of turning her in, and Dashiell Hammett first published The Maltese Falcon the same year Blackmail was made, 1929); the painting of a court jester that is Crewe’s last completed work, and which Alice vandalizes with the same knife she used to kill Crewe as she’s leaving his studio; and the overall cynicism towards the law and its credentialed enforcers. I haven’t been able to find a copy of Charles Bennett’s original play online, so I haven’t been able to see if it ends either the way the film does or the way Hitchcock originally wanted it to, but Hitchcock planned a more cynical ending in which Alice’s written confession would make it to Frank’s supervisor, she’d be arrested for the crime, and she’d go through the same elaborate processing by the police the unnamed suspect in another crime went through at the beginning. Then there’d be an exchange between Frank and one of his fellow officers in which the colleague would say, “What are you doing tonight, Frank – going out with your girl?” Frank wouldn’t answer, because his “girl” is the person they’ve just arrested, booked and locked up.

Instead, just as Alice is about to confess all to the supervisor, his phone rings and Frank distracts her and tells her not to go through with it. After all, the police had pinned the murder on Tracy the blackmailer, and given that he’d died in a fall from the skylight of the British Museum as the police were chasing him, it’s not like Alice has to risk feeling guilty about someone taking the rap and possibly being hanged for a killing she committed. Technically, Blackmail is one of the better talkies of the period; though there are highly stagy scenes in which characters talk unusually slowly (a hallmark of the early sound years, when the sound engineers overruled directors and told actors to talk in this highly stilted way, pausing between their cue and their own line), and John Longden and Cyril Ritchard both recalled getting neck aches from the way they had to twist their heads to aim their mouths at the hidden microphones, it’s also a film that moves quite effectively and illustrates how good Hitchcock would eventually get in stories like this. (Film historian Maurice Yacowar noted that of Hitchcock’s first 17 films, only four were in the mystery/suspense genre that would eventually become his specialty.) In 1930, film historian Paul Rotha published a book called The Film Till Now and cited Blackmail as one of the few “good talkies,” but he was taking a patronizing view of it and invidiously comparing it to Sergei Eisenstein’s silent masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin. Rotha predicted that Potemkin would remain in circulation for decades, while Blackmail would quickly be forgotten. Today, both Eisenstein and Hitchcock are regarded as two of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and Blackmail remains in circulation not only for its historical importance as Hitchcock’s first talkie but as a compelling entertainment in its own right (even though Hitchcock would not make a film I would regard as a masterpiece until his awesome Rich and Strange two years later).

The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (Above Average Productions, Broadway Video, Rutle, 1978)

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

Last night (Tuesday, January 14) my husband Charles and I watched a great movie he’d never seen complete before, and I’d seen but not for many years: The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, a 1978 co-production involving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the original cast (most of it, anyway) of Saturday Night Live. It’s, as you might suspect from the title, a spoof of The Beatles, and in particular of all the many ultra-serious documentaries that have been made about the real ones. Narrated by Monty Python’s Eric Idle (who frequently played a newscaster, notably on a Monty Python episode called “Wicker Island,” all of whose inhabitants were newscasters who continually interviewed each other), The Rutles features the “Pre-Fab Four” (ironically The Monkees, the Beatles spinoff created by Columbia Pictures for a half-hour TV sitcom that ran from 1966 to 1968, were also nicknamed the “Pre-Fab Four” because of their obvious imitation of The Beatles): “Ron Nasty” a.k.a. John Lennon (Neil Innes), “Dirk McQuigley” a.k.a. Paul McCartney (Eric Idle), “Stig O’Hara” a.k.a. George Harrison (Rikki Fataar, briefly a member of The Beach Boys in the early 1970’s), and “Barry Wom” a.k.a. Ringo Starr (John Halsey, who ironically looks more like Pete Best, the drummer The Beatles fired on the eve of stardom, than he does like Ringo). The Rutles came from Rutland (described on Wikipedia as “a ceremonial county in the East Midlands of England. It borders Leicestershire to the north and west, Lincolnshire to the north-east, and Northamptonshire to the south-west”), though they’re also depicted (like the real Beatles) as being from Liverpool. My ex-girlfriend Cat owned the Rutles soundtrack album on Warner Bros. Records and it came with an illustrated booklet giving even more details about The Rutles’ story than you got in the film – “Thousands of fans packed Kennedy Airport to await the arrival of The Rutles. Unfortunately, The Rutles flew into LaGuardia.” It was also a fun listen: Neil Innes wrote all the songs and did clever pastiches of Beatles hits, and part of the entertainment value to the album is picking out just what Beatles songs they were parodying. Neil Innes had a direct connection to The Beatles in that he’d been a member of the Bonzo Dog Band, a group that combined music and comedy. The Bonzo Dog Band were in the 1967 Beatles’ TV film Magical Mystery Tour; just before The Beatles do “Your Mother Should Know” the Bonzos play a song alternately titled “Baby, Don’t Do It” and “Death Cab for Cutie.” (The band Death Cab for Cutie got their name from that song.)

The Rutles’ story follows pretty closely on The Beatles’ story: Dirk McQuickly and Ron Nasty meet when they run into each other on the street – literally; Dirk picks the drunken Ron off the ground – and start a band together. They get gigs at The Cavern Club and then get a job offer to play at the Rat Keller in Hamburg, Germany. They live in a rat-infested cellar under the Rat Keller club, and narrator Idle proudly announces, “I’m in the original cellar, with some of the original rats.” Idle’s narration announces that The Rutles found a manager, Leggy Mountbatten (Terence Bayler), who’d lost a leg in World War II and had been “hopping around Liverpool ever since.” Various interviewees explain that what Leggy found attractive about The Rutles was not their music – “He hated their music,” Leggy’s mother Iris (Gwen Taylor) says – but “their trousers,” which were so skin-tight they left nothing to the imagination. (This is a lot funnier if you know that The Beatles’ real manager, Brian Epstein, was Gay.) There’s a great sequence in which narrator Idle announces that he’s gone to New Orleans in search of the origins of The Rutles’ sound. He says he’s standing “on the banks of the Mississippi,” when he’s in fact standing in front of the New Orleans branch of the Hibernia Bank. (Charles said that’s even funnier given that at the height of the Castro Street neighborhood’s status as San Francisco’s Gay Mecca, a well-known cruising ground was behind the Hibernia Bank. The area was jocularly known around Queer San Francisco as “Hibernia Beach.”) Directors Idle and Gary Weis (who got the job having already done filmed inserts for Saturday Night Live) then cut to the actual banks of the Mississippi and interview a Black blues musician who says he got his entire style from The Rutles, quit his job as a railroad brakeman to become a full-time musician, “and I’ve been starving ever since.” He sends Idle to his next-door neighbor who claims that he invented The Rutles’ sound – and his wife, who calls B.S. on him and says, “Every time someone comes around doing a Goddamned music documentary, he says he invented it! He says he invented The Everly Brothers, and Frank Sinatra, and Lawrence Welk … ” – it’s great fun and also wonderful satire on the reverse-racist consensus that has formed around jazz history that says all advances in jazz came from African-American musicians and white ones only copied them.

Ultimately The Rutles make their psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt. Rutter’s Only Darts Club Band, under the influence of a mind-altering substance: tea. (One wonders if Idle and Weis were deliberately reflecting the use of “tea” as slang for marijuana in the 1920’s and 1930’s.) There’s even a reproduction of a newspaper ad for the “Campaign for the Legalisation of Tea,” whose logo is the letters “CLT” formed to look like a teapot. It’s a parody of one the real Beatles signed calling for the decriminalization of LSD. Unfortunately, just as The Rutles are on top of the world’s music and culture, things start to unravel for them. First, their manager, Leggy Mountbatten, decides to abandon them to take a teaching job in Australia. Then The Rutles fall under the orbit of the Surrey mystic Arthur Sultan (Henry Woolf). After that both Ron and Dirk get married: Dirk to Martini (played by Bianca Jagger, real-life wife of rock star Mick Jagger until they divorced shortly after this film aired) and Ron to Chastity (Gwen Taylor), whose father “invented World War II,” according to Idle’s narration. (That has led a lot of commentators on this film to assume that she’s supposed to be Adolf Hitler’s daughter.) Mick Jagger is interviewed in The Rutles along with Paul Simon and Roger McGough, who also had a Beatles connection: he co-founded the comedy-rock band The Scaffold with “Mike McGear,” who was really Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother. Also, The Rutles are depicted as starting a company called “Banana” (after the real Beatles’ Apple) and holding a press conference (much like the way the real Beatles – John and Paul, anyway – gave a press conference that signaled to crazies and crooks all over the world that The Beatles were giving away money). In a great scene, a reporter (played by the real George Harrison) interviews a Banana spokesperson about the allegations that thieves were making off with Banana’s equipment – while a sneak thief makes off with cameras, desks, office furniture, and ultimately the reporter’s microphone.

To stanch the bleeding, Dirk brings in Billy Kodak to handle The Rutles’ financial affairs while the other three Rutles insist on the feared financial genius “Ron Decline,” a.k.a. Allen Klein (a marvelous performance by the late John Belushi), whose reputation is so intimidating Idle tells us that people have literally committed suicide to avoid having to meet with him. This leads to the eventual estrangement and breakup of The Rutles; Idle’s narration says that their last album, Let It Rot, was “released simultaneously as a film, an album, and a lawsuit,” and adds that the Rutles’ breakup was “the end of an era, but the beginning of one for lawyers who could look forward to decades of new litigation.” (In real life, Paul McCartney didn’t want any part of Allen Klein’s management and wanted to sue Klein to break the contract – but his attorneys told him that the only way to break it was to sue the other three Beatles, which he reluctantly did. Later, after Klein so badly screwed up the financial arrangements for George’s Concert for Bangladesh that both the British and American governments made more money in taxes from it than the Bangladeshi government did, George Harrison and John Lennon fired Klein and John later told Paul, “You were right about him.”) The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash is the first “mockumentary” spoof documentary on a rock ‘n’ roll band (anticipating This Is Spinal Tap by three years), and as Charles pointed out it, like Anna Russell’s spoof of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, is a lot funnier the more you know about the real story they’re spoofing. But even if you’re not super into Beatles’ trivia, All You Need Is Cash is great fun – and what I didn’t know is that they made a sequel, Can’t Buy Me Lunch, which is included as a bonus item on the All You Need Is Cash DVD and I heartily look forward to watching it!

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (MGM, Estudios Churubusco Azteca, 1973)

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

Last night (Monday, January 13) Turner Classic Movies was doing a tribute to Kris Kristofferson, country-folk-rock music star who made 51 movies. They were showing a film I’d had some interest in over the years: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, made in 1973 by maverick director Sam Peckinpah from a script by Rudy Wurlitzer. Peckinpah was criticized at the time for casting 44-year-old James Coburn as the 31-year-old Pat Garrett, and 36-year-old Kris Kristofferson as William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, who was just 21 when Garrett shot him. I’d been put off this movie for years because of Peckinpah’s reputation for violence – his immediately previous movie, Straw Dogs (his first non-Western), had grossed me out not only for its wall-to-wall violence but for its open advocacy of the fascist belief that violence “makes a man” of you. Indeed, the violence in the original cut was so extreme that MGM, which produced and distributed the film, made extensive edits in Peckinpah’s 120-minute director’s cut and chopped the film to 106 minutes largely by eliminating some of the violent scenes. The imdb.com “Trivia” page on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid describes an ultra-troubled shoot during which Peckinpah fought with everybody: with Rudy Wurlitzer (who wrote a book about the experience); with Kris Kristofferson (who later made up with him and worked for him twice more); and with James Aubrey, former CBS Wunderkind turned head of production at MGM when entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian bought the studio in 1969. It was Aubrey who supervised the cutting of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; we apparently owe the continued existence of Peckinpah’s cut (or at least most of it) to an anonymous drone in the editing room who stole a copy of it and hid it for decades until it eventually resurfaced. (Would that someone had done that to the original cut of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons!)

Seen today, with most of the violent scenes restored, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a mess, albeit an interesting mess. One thing I noticed about the film is it’s the only time I can remember Kris Kristofferson being clean-shaven, without his trademark beard. Another surprise is the actor playing “Luke,” a minor character in Billy’s orbit; when we first see him he’s topless and looked like a hunk – and I was mightily surprised to see the closing credits and learn that a very young Harry Dean Stanton had played him. I liked the soundtrack music, composed and performed by Bob Dylan – who’s also in the movie as a character called “Alias.” Apparently Peckinpah’s first choice for “Alias” was the singer-songwriter Roger Miller, but he luckily went with Dylan after Kris Kristofferson – whom Peckinpah had decided to cast as Billy after seeing him “live” at Doug Weston’s Troubadour nightclub in L.A. – recommended him. In their book The Golden Turkey Awards, Harry and Michael Medved nominated Dylan’s performance here as one of the worst ever given by a pop singer (though their winner was Tony Bennett in The Oscar) and claimed that Dylan outrageously mispronounced the character’s name as “Alley-Ass.” He didn’t; he pronounced it normally. Alias unobtrusively shifts loyalties from Billy the Kid to Pat Garrett and back; he spends most of his screen time just lurking around the main action, though there’s a scene inside a general store where, at Garrett’s request, he reads off the names of the canned goods on the store’s shelves and pronounces “beef stew” as “beef stoo.” Dylan also recorded the film’s musical score, and he did an excellent job; his simple country-folk noodlings with just guitar, harmonica (Dylan’s own), bass and drums work better than a big, expansive traditional Hollywood orchestral score would have.

According to James Coburn, Peckinpah drank heavily during the shoot and was usually plastered by noon; Coburn said Peckinpah was a genius in the morning and a drunk in the afternoon. (When Peckinpah fell ill during the shoot, members of the company reportedly made up a dummy to look like Peckinpah on a gurney being taken off the set – with a whiskey bottle hooked up to an I.V.) Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is an uneven movie, with bursts of Peckinpah violence alternating with scenes of almost unearthly beauty. The story is set in New Mexico but Peckinpah shot it on the other side of the border in old Mexico, and the imdb.com page lists Churubusco Studios as a co-production company with MGM. Because of Aubrey’s budgetary restrictions, Peckinpah had to lay off much of his American crew and hire Mexicans to take their places. The real story of Billy the Kid has been the subject of a number of movies, including King Vidor’s 1930 effort for MGM – which had two separate endings: the European version had Pat Garrett shoot Billy as he did in real life, but the American version had Garrett allowing Billy to escape across the border – a 1941 MGM remake with Robert Taylor; Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw (1940); the 1958 film The Left-Handed Gun (in which Paul Newman played Billy after the originally set actor, James Dean, died in a car crash); Chisum (1970), in which John Wayne played a free-lancer who joined forces with both Billy and Garrett to fight against corrupt landowners in Lincoln County, New Mexico; and a peculiar 1971 production called Dirty Little Billy that cast Michael J. Pollard, C. W. Moss in the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde, as Billy.

A few more good things about Peckinpah’s version: it features Jason Robards as New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace (best known today as the original author of Ben-Hur) and it depicts Billy’s gunslinging more or less correctly. The real William Bonney mostly killed his victims in formal duels in which they would both stand back-to-back, count to 10 and then turn around and fire on each other. In such a scene in the movie, both parties cheat – Billy’s opponent by turning around and firing on 8 and Billy himself by not walking back at all. Needless to say, Billy wins. I also liked the ending, even though it’s been ridiculed: Billy picks up a prostitute (played by Kristofferson’s real-life fiancée at the time, singer Rita Coolidge) and spends the night with her, and Garrett waits patiently outside the hostelry where this is taking place and only shoots Billy once he’s got sex. There’s also an extraordinary scene showing Garrett in bed with five hookers, at least one of whom is Black; apparently one of the things Peckinpah wanted to deconstruct about the Western genre is its usual sexlessness. And it was nice to see a lot of veteran actors in the genre, including Richard Jaeckel, Slim Pickens, Chill Wills, Barry Sullivan, Jack Elam, and Paul Fix, taking part in Peckinpah’s deconstruction of Western mythologies. It’s just that this film strikes me as a classic example of a good movie that could have been done even better in many ways: with a younger, stronger, more sensitive actor than Kristofferson as Billy (though he’s not at all bad; his beardless chin makes him genuinely sexy, even though we don’t see as awe-inspiring a chest as we do from Harry Dean Stanton), a script that made coherent sense instead of just leaping from one big action set-piece to the next, and a director not so in love with violence for its own sake – although, compared to Quentin Tarantino, Peckinpah was decidedly decorous! When my husband Charles came home from work about two-thirds of the way into it and I told him what I was watching, he said, “Is this before or after he shot The Cricket Match?” It took me a few seconds to realize what he meant: the Monty Python parody sketch of a cricket movie as directed by Peckinpah, complete with the various players using firearms to blow each other’s heads off in picturesque slow motion.

Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story (Cineflix Productions, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, January 12) I watched a couple of Lifetime movies in their typical “thriller Sundays” vein and then a bizarre fairy-tale film from 1918 on Turner Classic Movies. The first Lifetime film was the one that had “premiered” the night before but which I’d skipped because I wanted to watch the Judy Holliday features Born Yesterday and The Solid Gold Cadillac on TCM. It was called Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story, and was based on a real-life home invasion that took place in Winter Garden, Florida from November 15 through 17, 2009. Marcela Borges (Dascha Polanco) and her husband Rubens Loreano Morais (Johnathan Sousa) are having a quiet evening at home celebrating their son Ryan’s (Alessio Andrada) graduation from kindergarten (they have graduation ceremonies at kindergarten? I remember being so appalled by my eighth-grade graduation I deliberately avoided going to my high-school and college graduations) when they hear a knock on the door. Ryan actually opens the door for the three home-invasion robbers, Miguel Diaz-Santiz (Marito Lopez), Victor Manuel Sanchez (Mitchell Jaramillo), and Oscar Diaz-Hernandez (Ivan Lopez). The three young men enter with guns drawn and hold the family hostage. They announce that they are demanding $200,000 ransom from them, and if the money isn’t paid in 24 hours they will kill all of them. The hostage-takers tell the family that they answer to a higher-up, and in a legitimate surprise that turns out to be a young woman, Bianca Dos Santos (Nisa Gunduz), who’s first shown as an icon of butch-evil sexiness in a black shirt and skin-tight black jeans. Eventually she enters the scene and she and her male associates are all wearing masks to conceal their identities. There are two attempts by Rubens to grab one of the guns, which one of the gangsters has dropped on the floor, but both times they catch him in time.

Later there’s a scene in which Marcela, alone with Bianca, manages to grab her and hold a knife to her throat. Does she do what any halfway sensible person would do – call 911 and get the police out there, especially since she’s got her cell phone in her hand? No-o-o-o-o, she rather lamely threatens Bianca until her male henchmen re-enter the scene and hold their guns on Marcela, forcing her to drop the knife. Marcela vainly tries to reason with Bianca, pleading for the life of her unborn child (it’s already been established that she’s pregnant with the couple’s second son, and that Rubens’s trucking business took a hit from the 2008 economic crash but has now been rebuilt), and later Bianca mocks her appeal and indicates she’s going to show her no mercy just because she’s a fellow female and pregnant. Bianca’s attitude is so merciless and nasty I kept waiting for an explanation in Crystal Verge’s script that there was some sort of personal connection between the two women’s families and Bianca was seeking not only money but revenge. But it turns out merely that Bianca’s mother once did Rubens’s taxes, and that’s how she knew so much about the family’s finances. Terror Comes Knocking is a nicely done story, more than decently directed by Felipe Rodriguez, and I give Lifetime and its producing company, Cineflix, a lot of credit for using actual Latinos and Latinas both in front of and behind the cameras. I also give the casting director (uncredited on imdb.com) for finding genuinely Latino/a actors for the leading roles on both sides of the moral divide. But the film suffers from its monotony; all too many of its scenes merely show the villains beating the shit out of the good guys and it gets tiresome after a while. I’ve written before that Lifetime’s movies are generally better when they’re based on true stories – and, judging from Shivangi Sinja’s online posts at https://moviedelic.com/marcela-borges/, this movie (unlike many of Lifetime’s previous ones, including films advertised merely as “inspired by” rather than “based on” a true story) hews quite closely to the facts of the case – but not this time. The film they showed immediately after it, The Bear Lake Murders, had stronger, more complex characterizations and a much more credible storyline even though it, unlike Terror Comes Knocking, was entirely fictional.

The Bear Lake Murders (CMW Horizon Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, January 12), after their fact-based movie Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story, Lifetime showed a much better film even though it was entirely fictional. It was The Bear Lake Murders, set in Portland and Bear Lake, Oregon and dealing with a young woman police detective on the Portland force named Ally Foster (Mercedes de la Zerda). In the opening, set in Portland, Ally has tracked down and captured Caden Hodge (Chris Fassbender), a former police profiler who went off the rails and became a serial killer himself, using his psychological skills and knowledge of the art of profiling to evade capture. Ally has tracked him down to the home of a middle-aged woman who’d already been through an abusive relationship with a man and become a recluse from it. With the aid of her backup officers, she’s able to capture Caden alive, and he’s prosecuted and duly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for 20 previous murders. But the case doesn’t turn out well for Ally personally; her supervisor orders him to take a paid vacation immediately and use the time to recover. Ally desperately pleads with him to let her continue working, saying that the only way she can sustain her mental health is to stay on the job, but the chief is adamant. So Ally decides to return to the family cabin in Bear Lake, Oregon, where she grew up. As she matured into a young woman, she had two rivals for her affections: Roy Martin (Tom Stevens), who was then a junior officer in Bear Lake’s small police force and is now the sheriff of the town; and Miles (Brandon Giddens), a mystery man who’s just returned from serving in the military and is obviously dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. Eventually she broke up with both of them, moved to Portland and got a job with the Portland Police Department, and she hasn’t looked back until now. Forced by departmental edict to stay in Bear Lake, she’s at once saddened and gratified when people start getting murdered in Bear Lake and, as an expert big-city detective, Roy and his deputy, Brodie Doyle (Blake Williams), welcome her help solving the cases.

The first murder is of Sienna Hartley (Jennifer Procé), an online influencer who does a video blog on various unspoiled rural tourist destinations, with the obvious effect that her posts will attract so many people to them they won’t stay unspoiled very long. We meet Sienna Hartley in the local coffee shop, where she rudely brushes off a waitress for taking too long to serve her coffee. Sienna angrily demands to get it to go instead, and on her way out of the restaurant she bumps into Roy’s sister Rebecca (Magalie). Rebecca accidentally spills Sienna’s coffee, Sienna goes into a big hissy-fit about it, and Rebecca is crushed because previously she’s looked up to Sienna and followed her blog religiously, but now she’s disillusioned and presses the button on her phone to unfollow her. There’s some nice dialogue from writer Ken Miyamoto to the effect that you shouldn’t try to meet the people you admire because they’ll do something to piss you off. Later Sienna is standing in front of the edge of a cliff, rhapsodizing about the glories of the Oregon scenery to whoever’s live-streaming her, and just then a mysterious figure in a hoodie (hoodies have become regulation wear for Lifetime’s killers, at least partly because the hood conceals a person’s gender) pushes her off the cliff while she’s still recording the proceedings on her phone. Unfortunately, the police are unable to find her phone, though they’re convinced – rightly, as it turns out – that she filmed her own murder and whoever killed her will be recognizable on the phone’s video. The next victim is Austin (Jonas Janz), who’s run afoul of the Bear Lake police in general and deputy Brodie Doyle in particular because he, his girlfriend Eve (Tavia Cervi), and some fellow college students have rented a cabin at Bear Lake for the summer and are hosting loud, wild parties there, complete with the obligatory red plastic Dixie cups that have become a symbol of underage drinking in Lifetime movies. Brodie, responding to locals’ complaints, raids the party and demands that Austin shut it down. When Austin refuses, Brodie walks over to the big speaker that’s playing their music and pulls the cord, silencing it at once. (This is a glitch because their sound system is in stereo, and he’d have had to pull the cords to both speakers to get the sound off completely.)

Later Austin goes for a late-night swim in the lake and dares Eve to go with him. Eve declines but Austin goes anyway – whereupon the mysterious hooded figure goes to the box supplying power for the streetlights and rewires it so when Austin finishes his swim and grabs the bar to hoist himself out of the water, he’ll get a lethal dose of electricity. Roy and Brodie find the body and immediately assume it was an accidental drowning until the coroner autopsies the body and declares he was electrocuted. Meanwhile, Caden Hodge, the serial killer Ally caught in the prologue, has escaped when the bus taking him to prison crashed in the mountains off the coast of Bear Lake. He breaks into Ally’s home and confronts her, but Roy rescues her by shooting Caden dead. There are now two suspects in the Bear Lake murders – escaped convict Caden and Miles, who patrols his property with a rifle to drive tourists off his land – but about half an hour before the movie’s end I was starting to suspect Brodie Doyle. I was right, as it turned out; he had a pathological fear of Bear Lake being ruined by tourists and he started knocking off people so word would spread that the lake was too dangerous to visit. Brodie, it turned out, also killed Roy’s and Rebecca’s father, who had proceeded Roy as town sheriff and had threatened to fire Brodie from the force. The big climax occurs when Rebecca Martin is home alone after having finally found – stumbled on, really – Sienna Hartley’s cell phone and got it to work. Roy has sent Brodie over to his place to make sure Rebecca is O.K., but almost as soon as Brodie arrives Rebecca unlocks Sienna’s last video and it shows Brodie killing her. Fortunately, Roy and Ally arrive in the nick of time to save Rebecca.

Directed by Danny J. Boyle – namesake of the Academy Award-winning filmmaker of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting – quite effectively, The Bear Lake Murders (despite its ho-hum title) is gloriously entertaining. It helps that Roy Martin and Brodie Doyle are both played by drop-dead gorgeous actors – though Tom Stevens and Blake Williams are so similar-looking they could have been cast as brothers, and the only reliable way I had of telling them apart was that Williams had shorter hair. At the end we see Ally Martin back in Portland, handing her resignation to the chief who forced her to take that vacation she didn’t want, and writer Miyamoto keeps her fate after that carefully ambiguous; we assume (or at least I did) that she’s going back to Bear Lake to resume her affair with Roy and become his deputy, now that the position is unexpectedly open, but that’s not spelled out in the movie as it stands. The Bear Lake Murders is actually quite good suspense filmmaking, succeeding where Terror Comes Knocking failed in giving us a coherent plotline and characters we want to see prevail. Even the villain is at least understandable; like Christine Conradt, Ken Miyamoto is savvy enough to realize that a bad guy with some sympathetic characteristics is more frightening than an out-and-out maniac.

The Star Prince (Little Players’ Film Company, Grapevine Video, 1918)

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

After the two Lifetime movies last night (Sunday, January 12), I turned on Turner Classic Movies for a truly odd item: The Star Prince (1918), written and directed by Madeline Brandeis (a tragically short-lived filmmaker who died in 1937 at age 39; she has three film credits on imdb.com as producer but only one, this one, as writer and director). The Star Prince is an example of a weird sub-genre of fairy-tale movies enacted only by children; the studio that made it was even called “Little Players’ Film Company.” The most famous examples were made at Fox by directors Sidney and Chester Franklin in the ‘teens (both Franklin brothers went on to major directorial careers making movies with adult casts) and included spoofs of then-current films like Cinderella and Babes in the Woods. I remember reading an article about these in Films in Review decades ago and the author noted their frustration that some of the “Franklin Kid Pix” that still existed referenced serious fairy-tale or fantasy movies that were now lost. The Star Prince is a mashup of several fairy stories that in a way anticipates the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical Into the Woods (1986). It’s about a baby boy lost in the wilderness and found and raised by a woodsman, whose wife vainly protests that they already have four kids of their own and can’t afford to take care of another. Since the woodsman found the baby just after seeing a meteor fall to earth, he believes the baby is a “Star Prince” sent down from heaven. His real origin story is a good deal more prosaic: he’s the daughter of a beggar woman (Edith Rothschild) who was crossing the forest when she was set upon by robbers. She fled for her own life but, in her panic, left her child behind.

Seven years later the boy has grown up and calls himself the “Star Prince” (played by six-year-old girl Zoe Rae in an early example of transgender casting). He insists that he’s superior to the rest of the family and the common run of humanity, and he shows it by bossing around his foster siblings. He also insults his own mother when she comes around begging for food. A fairy comes along and punishes the Star Prince by putting a spell on him that makes his face ugly and gives him a huge wart on his nose. The Star Prince leaves his home in search of his destiny, and stumbles into the orbit of an evil dwarf (John Dorland) who is determined to marry the local princess (Dorphia Brown). Not surprisingly, the princess isn’t thrilled by this and has a fantasy image of a prince who will descend from heaven, rescue her from the fate of being stuck with the dwarf, and marry her, sort of like Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin. There’s also a witch (Marjorie Clare Bowden) who appears to be the dwarf’s partner, and the small army of imps they command to attack the castle and force the princess to marry the dwarf. As the Star Prince ventures through the forest, Madeline Brandeis pads her film with lots of footage of animals – notably deer and rabbits – as well as a squirrel who the now-humbled Star Prince rescues when he gets caught in a tree. (I’d really like to know just where this film was shot; the scenery is gorgeous.) My husband Charles, who got home from work about 20 minutes after the film started, was convinced that the squirrel was a stop-motion animation puppet and wondered if this was the first use of stop-motion in a film. (Not true: the very young Willis O’Brien was already doing his crude Claymation films of boxers well before 1918. O’Brien’s first credit on imdb.com was The Dinosaur and the Missing Link from 1915, featuring an ape-man he called the ancestor of his most famous creation, King Kong. By 1919 he had made his full-fledged special-effects debut with Herbert M. Dawley’s The Ghost of Slumber Mountain.) I suspect that if the squirrel were indeed done with stop-motion, Brandeis and her crew used limited animation (two, three or four frames per move of the model) rather than O’Brien’s full animation (one frame per move).

Eventually the Star Prince crashes the castle just as the princess has refused to go through the ceremony and announced that her destiny is to marry the first man who comes along once the moon kisses the stars – which indeed happens (it was probably supposed to be a lunar eclipse). The Star Prince refuses to go through with the marriage ceremony even though he and the princess want to get together because he first must make amends to his mother for having insulted her lo those many years ago. Fortunately, she’s right there on the scene, so he can do that and go on with the wedding. The Star Prince is a cute movie – with an all-child cast it could hardly be anything else – and though there are some glitches, notably the establishing shot of the castle which has two people walking on it who don’t have any relation to this film’s characters (so even this early filmmakers were using stock footage), it’s a well-made movie for 1918, with lots of close-ups and editing that is at least functional and tells the story effectively. Brandeis also got good performances from the kids in her cast (though the actor playing the king seemed way too interested in toying with his fake beard to be credible), especially from Zoe Rae in the lead. She was born in Chicago in 1910 and made her screen debut at three. Rae’s parents signed her to a contract with Universal, who used her so often she became known as the “Universal Baby.” She lost her Universal contract thanks to her parents; her dad wanted her to have a normal education and her mom was a typically headstrong “stage mother” who bullied the studio’s executives. Once she grew up, she tried for careers as a screenwriter, a singer and a dance teacher before marrying Ronald Barlow in 1934 and staying with him until his death in 1999. Before her own death in 2006 in retirement in Oregon, Rae was discovered by film buffs who were astonished to learn that the “Universal Baby” was still alive – though, according to imdb.com, her Universal films are all lost and The Star Prince is the only film of hers known to survive.