Nanook of the North (Northern Productions, Révillon Frères, Pathé, Film Preservation Associates, 1922)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 29) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies three-film triple bill featuring W. C. Fields and then saw a “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a quite different sort of film: Nanook of the North, Robert J. Flaherty’s pioneering non-fiction (sort of) movie about the Inuit of the Ungava Peninsula in northern Canada in general and one Inuk (“Inuk” is just the singular form of “Inuit”) in particular, the hunter Nanook. The 36-year-old Flaherty had been an explorer for years, specializing in northern Canada and working for mining companies interested in locating and exploring iron deposits for extraction and conversion into industrial steel. Over the years he had got to know a lot about Inuit culture, and on one of his expeditions he packed a movie camera and used it to film the Inuit’s lives, especially the hunts on which they tracked down the animals that were their sole source of food. Flaherty actually edited some of his footage into a travelogue and sent a positive print to Harvard University for a special screening, but later he accidentally burned either part or all of his negative. Flaherty later decided it wasn’t much of a loss because the film wasn’t very good anyway. As Flaherty said later, “It was utterly inept, simply a scene of this and that, no relation, no thread of a story or continuity whatever, and it must have bored the audience to distraction. Certainly it bored me.” Flaherty talked it over with his wife Frances and hit on the idea of making another movie, and this time centering it around one Inuit family and their struggle to survive in what he called “the bitter climate of the North, the bitterest climate in the world.” In 1920 he met Thierry Mallett, an executive with the French company Révillon Frères, at a cocktail party and outlined his idea for a film about Inuit life. Révillon Frères had chafed for years that their principal competitor for outfitting Arctic explorers, the Hudson’s Bay Company, had the huge advantage of free advertising in every atlas that showed “Hudson Bay.” Mallett introduced Flaherty to John Révillon, who agreed to finance the film if it could be credited as “Révillon Frères Present.” In the meantime makers of cinematic equipment had improved the panoramic tripod so a camera could be moved both horizontally and vertically with a single arm, an innovation that became basic to Flaherty’s filmmaking technique.

Flaherty decided not only to shoot Nanook on location but to develop the film on site and show it to the Inuit who were playing the principal roles. “The showing of the rushes to the actors was a deliberate part of a philosophy of filmmaking which Flaherty had evolved during his years of waiting,” said Flaherty biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall. “Nanook was to be a film of the Inuit by the Inuit, ‘of the people, by the people,” insofar as that was possible.” Flaherty was helped by the fact that the standard film of the time was orthochromatic, which was insensitive to red light, so it could be developed relatively easily under red safelights. (Later, with his next film Moana, Flaherty pioneered the use of panchromatic film, which produced deeper, richer, and more varied greyscales but needed to be developed and fixed in total darkness.) Flaherty also discovered the Akeley camera, which he chose for Nanook because it was lubricated with solid graphite instead of oil, which would have frozen on the Arctic locations. To cast his film he hired an Inuk hunter named Allakarillak, though he renamed him “Nanook” after the Ungava Inuit word for “bear.” To play Nanook’s wife, or at least his domestic partner (whatever arrangements the Inuit had for recognizing relationships is unclear from the film), Flaherty chose a woman named Alice Nevalinga or Maggie Nujarluktuk (sources differ) and named her character “Nyla.” (The Wikipedia page on Nanook of the North quotes people associated with the filming of a 1988 documentary called Nanook Revisited and claims that both Alice and Cunayou, who plays Nanook’s and Nyla’s daughter, were “common-law wives” of Robert Flaherty, and Alice/Maggie had actually had Flaherty’s son.)

The version of Nanook Turner Classic Movies showed was a 1998 reissue prepared by David Shepard for a company called Film Preservation Associates, and it featured a new musical accompaniment by Timothy Brock. It contained a written prologue Flaherty almost certainly added after the original release, which made the claim that two years after the film was made Nanook t/n Allakarillak had died of starvation in Ungava while hunting for deer. Modern sources have questioned this and said he really died more prosaically of tuberculosis. The film has been criticized for showing the Inuit as living at a lower level of technology than they actually did. According to Calder-Marshall, “Flaherty found that Nanook and the rest weren’t really dressed in Inuit clothes and he had to go to great trouble and expense to procure for them the clothes which they should be wearing if they were to appear on the screen as genuinely Inuit as they in fact were.” Flaherty also showed the Inuit hunting for walruses and seals with harpoons when by 1920 they had access to firearms. Returning to New York after spending 1920 shooting Nanook in the Arctic environment of Ungava, Flaherty spent 1921 editing it and getting Carl Stearns Clancy to write the intertitles. He had done all the other technical work himself, writing, directing, photographing, and editing the film, and had trained Inuit people to do the grunt work of actually developing the film on site. Flaherty showed the finished movie to various American studios looking for a distribution deal, which he didn’t get. The studio that finally accepted the film for release was Pathé, which like Révillon Frères was French-owned. Fortunately for Flaherty, Madame Brunet, wife of the president of Pathé, loved the film and insisted that her husband buy it. Flaherty was able to place the film with Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel by using a stratagem of packing the audience for the screening with carefully selected friends who would applaud at the critical moments, “The plan succeeded,” Calder-Marshall wrote. “When the lights went up in the Capitol projection room, Roxy babbled words like ‘epic’ and ‘masterpiece.’ He booked it.”

Later Pathé decided to ensure the success of Nanook by block-booking it, a system of coercion all the major studios engaged in until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it illegal in the late 1940’s. Pathé had just accepted Harold Lloyd’s first feature, Grandma’s Boy, for release, and the studio told theatre owners they couldn’t get Grandma’s Boy unless they took Nanook along with it as a double-bill partner. On its release, Nanook got great reviews at a time when film criticism was still in its infancy. As Robert Sherwood wrote in The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-1923, Nanook “came from a hitherto unheard-of source, and it was entirely original in form. … Here was drama rendered far more vital than any trumped-up drama could ever be by the fact that it was all real. Nanook was no playboy enacting a part which could be forgotten as soon as the greasepaint had been rubbed off; he was himself an Eskimo struggling to survive. The North was no mechanical affair of wind-machines and paper snow; it was the North, cruel and terribly strong.” Other critics were less kind; Iris Barry, who would become curator of film for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and do more than any other person to establish that films were a legitimate art form and museums should preserve them as they would artworks in other media, had previously worked as a secretary for Vilhjalmur Stefansson (born William Stephenson), a Canadian explorer and professor of Icelandic descent, who had reportedly called Nanook “a most inexact picture of Eskimo life.” Barry sneered that “Nanook was actually taken in the latitude of Edinburgh and acted by extremely sophisticated Eskimos.” Nanook’s defenders pointed out that, while Ungava was at the same latitude as Edinburgh, its climate was considerably colder and more bitter. Flaherty conceded that he’d had to fake some shots, notably the ones showing Nanook and his family inside an igloo. First he’d had Nanook build an igloo that was considerably larger than the 12-foot ones traditionally used by the Inuit. Then, when Nanook couldn’t build an igloo large enough for Flaherty’s purposes (he needed one larger than normal to accommodate the heavy, bulky cameras of the period) without its roof collapsing, Flaherty agreed to cut away part of the igloo, so in the film you can see Nanook and his family breathing with steamy breaths and exposed to the cold climate as they wouldn’t have been in a normal igloo.

What comes off most strongly about Nanook of the North today is how vividly Flaherty dramatized Nanook’s and his family’s constant struggle to survive. Once they kill the walrus in an early scene, they don’t wait to drag the beast back to base camp, let alone cook it; they cut its flesh open (using knives made of whalebone, which they wet down with their spit to lubricate them because otherwise the knives would become brittle and shatter in the Arctic cold) and eat it raw on the spot. Later, when they kill a seal, along with eating it themselves they also throw bits of its meat to their dogs (I’d been wondering how they fed the dogs), which they use as beasts of burden to carry their sleds. They also carefully preserve the hides of these creatures because those are the main items they have to offer at the white-run trading post which is their only interface with Western civilization. There’s a famous scene in the trading post in which Nanook and his family marvel at a phonograph, try to wrap their minds around the fact that whites have figured out how to record their voices on shellac and clay discs, and Nanook tries to nibble at one of the records. Nanook of the North has often been called the world’s first true documentary film (though it would be in reviewing Flaherty’s next film, Moana, that British film critic John Grierson, later a director himself, would write that the film “has documentary value,” thereby establishing the word “documentary” as the genre name for non-fiction films in general), though it’s also been called an example of “salvage ethnography,” an attempt by using survivors of a lost culture to dramatize what that culture was like before white people “discovered” it and frequently loused it up. Nanook of the North remains a haunting film today, and one that makes its effect by its very simplicity. It doesn’t have a plot as such, merely the actions of a family living constantly on the thin edge of starvation and matter-of-factly doing what they have to do to survive.

Caged (Warner Bros.-First National, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, March 28) my husband Charles and I watched on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program on Turner Classic Movies a film I’d long been curious about but had never seen before: Caged, a 1950 women’s prison drama from Warner Bros. Apparently Caged was the fulfillment of a long-held desire on the part of Jack Warner and his executives to do an exposé about conditions in women’s prisons similar to the one they’d done about male institutions in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). Actually they’d already done a women’s prison movie in Ladies They Talk About (1933), based on a play co-written by Dorothy Mackaye, who’d served time in a women’s prison herself, and though I haven’t seen it in years I remember it as being better than Caged. Eddie Muller mentioned the tangled production history of Caged, including that it was first announced as a vehicle for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, which fell through because both of them wanted the plum role of Marie Allen (ultimately played by Eleanor Parker), and it didn’t seem to have occurred to either Davis or Crawford that by 1950 they were both way too old to play the part of a naïve 19-year-old who draws a 1-to-15-year sentence because her husband tried to rob a bank, unwittingly pressed her into service to drive the getaway car, and was killed in a police shootout while she was charged as an “accessory” and convicted. The actress it really needed was Barbara Stanwyck at the age she was when she made Ladies They Talk About. Once Marie is incarcerated she ends up caught between a narcissistic, sadistic matron named Evelyn Harper (Hope Emerson, a formidable-looking 6’2” actress who had a reasonable career for the next decade until she died of cancer at age 62); another con named Kitty Stark (Betty Garde), who tries to recruit Marie to join her shoplifting gang as soon as she’s released; a surprisingly sympathetic reform-minded warden, Ruth Benton (Agnes Moorehead), who desperately wants to get rid of Harper but can’t because she’s a political appointee and her sponsors keep her in place; and the overall deadening routine of prison life.

Caged began as a series of articles by Virginia Kellogg, a reporter who actually got herself incarcerated in a women’s jail for two months as part of her research. Kellogg also co-wrote the screenplay with Bernard C. Schoenfeld, and it was directed by John Cromwell, who’s usually not one of my favorite filmmakers (though he gets political points from me as a blacklist victim and as the father of James Cromwell, who played both Prince Philip and George H. W. Bush and also was the human lead in the film Babe; James became a vegetarian after making Babe, and when asked why, he said, “What? Do you think I should eat my co-star?”). John Cromwell gets points from me for casting Agnes Moorehead in a sympathetic role (the only other directors who did were Orson Welles, who’d discovered her, and Douglas Sirk) and for quite effectively dramatizing the soul-deadening aspects of prison life. At one point Warden Benton is shown in close-up staring through the barred windows of her office, and we get the point: prison is as much a source of confinement for those running the place as for those being kept inside it. There’s a great scene in which Marie forgets that during the count routines that are supposed to determine whether all the prisoners are present and accounted for, she’s supposed to respond with her last name first. There’s another beautiful sequence in which Marie finds a cat that had somehow drifted inside the prison (the writers understate but still make the point that the cat can pass in and out of the prison walls whereas the humans can’t) and tries to adopt it, only Matron Harper catches her with it, seizes it, and strangles it while the prisoners start a mini-riot that is quickly shut down by Warden Benton and Matron Harper. One of the gimmicks of Caged is that Kitty is paying Harper what amounts to protection money to be allowed to operate her recruitment scheme inside the prison, only this unravels when Elvira Powell (Lee Patrick from The Maltese Falcon) ends up in the prison as part of an elaborate plan to protect her business as the city’s leading madam. Immediately Matron Harper tells Kitty that she no longer needs her or her friends’ money now that Elvira is in the prison and has a lot more money with which to bribe her as well as a lot more influence “outside.”

Both Charles and I had a similar reaction to the movie’s successful dramatization of going “stir-crazy”; it meant literally freaking out and going insane from the stresses of prison life. One such character is June Roberts (Olive Deering), who’s turned down for parole because she doesn’t have an established job and home to go to if she’s released, and she responds by hanging herself. We’re also told what “dead time” means: the extra months convicts have to serve because, even though they’ve been paroled, the system hasn’t lined up housing and a job for them. Also, early on in the film we learn that Marie Allen is pregnant (though we have to take that on faith because Warner Bros.’s makeup department didn’t do anything to make her look pregnant). She gives birth in the prison infirmary after being told that the child’s birth certificate won’t record anything but the name of the town the prison is in. When she gives birth she’s certain that her mother will take custody of the child (a boy whom she names Tommy, after her late husband and the baby’s father), only mom shocks the hell out of Marie by telling her that her second husband won’t allow her to take the child and raise it until Marie is released. There’s also a singularly joyless Christmas celebration for the convicts, with presents supplied by the Salvation Army, and a carol sing which Marie is encouraged to join, but she refuses. “Why should I have to sing?” she says, and of course I couldn’t help but joke, “Because you’re going to be in The Sound of Music.” (Eleanor Parker was in The Sound of Music, as the rich woman Christopher Plummer dumps for Julie Andrews.) When Marie’s own first parole application is turned down, she responds with a half-hearted escape attempt; later she makes another one and gets as far as grabbing the barbed wire that tops the prison walls before she’s caught, dragged down again, and sentenced to three days in solitary confinement. Matron Harper on her own authority orders the three days stretched to a full month, and before Marie goes into solitary Harper takes her to her own room in the prison (a preposterous locale decorated with a sampler woven by the prisoners reading, “We Love Our Matron” – her demand for virtual worship seems quite Trumpian in today’s political climate) and literally shaves her head bald. Cromwell’s direction and Carl Guthrie’s cinematography make this seem like a weird sort of female castration.

The film also is surprisingly direct about prostitution for a Code-era movie; one of the inmates, Jeta Kovsky a.k.a. “Smoochie” (Jan Sterling, wasted as usual; her terrific performance in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole the next year should have catapulted her into stardom, but since almost no one saw that movie it didn’t), is described as a prostitute, and Elvira Powell’s attempts to recruit Marie to her operation after her release is clearly aimed at “turning her out” and making her a hooker while she’s still young and attractive enough to work as one. The film lurches to a climax when Warden Benton tries to fire Matron Harper, only Harper responds by leaking a story to a tabloid about alleged “immorality” happening in the women’s prison under Benton’s watch. (This is the only sign we’ve seen of any Lesbian goings-on, though they were stock in trade among women’s prison films both earlier – Ladies They Talk About and other 1930’s films had featured surprisingly butch-looking inmates and left the audiences to draw their own conclusions – and later: Eddie Muller recalled a whole sub-genre of women’s prison films from the 1970’s that were aimed at titillating straight male audiences with lots of scenes of partially undressed women having at each other, albeit in R-rated ways.) Benton’s male bosses come to the prison and demand her resignation; she insists that if they try to fire her she’ll demand her legal right to a public hearing; and the matter is left unresolved with both Benton and Harper employed. Only Harper isn’t around for long because the put-upon Kitty grabs a fork from a mess tray and stabs Harper to death in the back. Kitty, who’d already been serving a life sentence for murder, is sent to Death Row.

Meanwhile, Marie gets her second parole hearing and actually is set for release – only Warden Benton sees through her scheme. Marie hooked up with Elvira Powell and agreed to a phony job offer as a “cashier” which will lead ultimately to her working as a whore in one of Elvira’s well-established bordellos. Warden Benton tries to talk Marie out of accepting parole under these circumstances, and pleads with her to stay in for two more months until Benton can arrange for her to get a legitimate job offer. Marie turns her down, and at the end Benton’s secretary is going through the prisoner files and asks Benton what to do with Marie’s. “Keep it active,” Benton says. “She’ll be back.” I really didn’t like the ending of Caged (whose title, like Who Killed Teddy Bear, didn’t have an exclamation point in the credits but did in the posters); it flashed me back to the ending of the 1962 film Sweet Bird of Youth and the remarks made about it at the time by an anonymous reviewer for FilmInk: “You can have a popular film with a happy ending or a sad ending, that doesn’t matter – what matters is that it’s a just ending. Justice must be served.” I would argue that Marie Allen did not deserve the unjust ending she got in Caged. It’s possible that Eleanor Parker wasn’t a good enough actress to make us believe that just 10 months in prison had turned her from a nice, morally innocent young girl into a hardened criminal (I suspect the Barbara Stanwyck of 1933 could have done it perfectly), or maybe the fault lay with writers Kellogg and Schoenfeld for not giving her enough material to work with. How I would have wanted it to end was that Warden Barton would get her public hearing and use it to expose the corruption within the women’s prison, with Marie Allen as her star witness.

In Eddie Muller’s outro he claimed that one of the things that had most surprised Virginia Kellogg when she researched women’s prisons for this film was how easy it was for the inmates to obtain drugs. Naturally she wanted to write that into her script, but the Production Code Administration and its chief enforcer, Joseph Breen, vetoed it and held fast to the Production Code’s flat prohibition on all depictions of recreational drug abuse in American movies. Six years later, Otto Preminger would film Nelson Algren’s novel The Man with the Golden Arm, about a card dealer in an illegal casino who’s addicted to heroin. He released the film without a Production Code seal of approval and had a major hit anyway, Ironically, Eleanor Parker was in The Man with the Golden Arm as well, playing the wheelchair-bound and neurotically possessive wife of the drug-addicted character (Frank Sinatra) who tries to keep him hooked, while his alternate girlfriend (Kim Novak) wants to help him recover. Muller also mentioned that just about every previous film about a women’s prison, including Cecil B. DeMille’s The Godless Girl (1928), Ladies They Talk About, and the surprisingly good 1938 RKO “B” Condemned Women, had ended with a sympathetic male character falling genuinely in love with the female lead and helping her achieve redemption. It’s probably just as well the makers of Caged avoided that particular set of clichés, but the ending they came up with was so depressing and nihilistic I found it even less satisfying.

Roxie Hart (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, March 26) my husband Charles and I watched a 1942 20th Century-Fox film called Roxie Hart, based on a story better known as Chicago. The original play Chicago was written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who was born in Louisville or Lexington, Kentucky in July 1896. Watkins’s original ambition was to be a classic Greek scholar, but she changed when, while attending Radcliffe College, she took a workshop in playwriting from Harvard professor George Pierce Baker. He urged his students to work in some other job that would give them experience of the real world before they knuckled down and became playwrights, and accordingly Watkins took a job as reporter for the Chicago Tribune and worked there for eight months. During that time she became known as one of the “sob sisters,” women reporters who wrote tear-jerking stories about women who’d drifted from the straight and narrow and become involved in scandals. Among the women she wrote about were two showgirls, Belva Gaertner and Beulah Sheriff Annan, who were accused of murder. Thanks at least in part due to Watkins’s favorable stories about them, they were both acquitted even though Watkins herself was convinced they were guilty. When she quit the Tribune she wrote a play called Chicago in which Gaertner and Annan were fused into Roxie Hart, aspiring musical star who when a man is shot dead in her apartment hits on the idea of falsely confessing to his murder, on the grounds that no woman has ever been sentenced to death in Chicago before and going through with a trial and her subsequent acquittal will be a boost to her show-business career. Chicago was produced on Broadway in 1926, with George Abbott directing and Francine Larrimore as Roxie, and a year later it was filmed as a silent with Phyllis Haver as Roxie.

In 1942 20th Century-Fox bought the remake rights and filmed it as Roxie Hart, with William K. Wellman directing, Ginger Rogers as Roxie, and Adolphe Menjou as her high-powered attorney, Billy Flynn. After 1941 Watkins, who’d retired from writing and moved from Hollywood to Florida after the death of her father, became an intensely committed Christian and donated most of her money to establish Greek and Latin courses at Bible colleges. In the 1960’s Bob Fosse approached Watkins for the rights to do Chicago as a Broadway musical, only Watkins turned him down because she still felt guilty that her role in the original stories had led to two murderesses going free. After Watkins died in 1969, her estate agreed to let Fosse buy the rights, and the resulting stage musical opened in 1975, with Fosse’s wife Gwen Verdon as Roxie and Chita Rivera as her stage partner Velma Kelly. The story’s film rights lingered in development hell for a quarter-century and various projected versions were floated, including one which would have co-starred Liza Minnelli as Roxie and her half-sister Lorna Luft as Velma, before the movie was finally made in 2002, with Rob Marshall directing, Bill Condon writing, Renée Zellwegger as Roxie, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma, and Richard Gere as the slimy attorney Billy Flynn. The 2002 Chicago film was the surprise winner of that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture. The 1942 film opens in that year, with bartender O’Malley (William Frawley, best known today as Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy) and reporter Homer Howard (George Montgomery, annoying as usual), reminiscing about the good old days of the 1920’s and the notorious case of Roxie Hart (Ginger Rogers, wearing a dark wig that was supposed to make her look like a redhead; ironically her natural hair color was brown but she’d been bleaching herself blonde for a decade) in particular.

We then see the outside of Roxie’s apartment with two bullet holes appearing in the door and four shots being heard on the soundtrack. The murder victim is a would-be producer who was trying to seduce Roxie with promises of stardom even though Roxie already had a husband, Amos (George Chandler), though as part of his pre-trial strategy Billy Flynn tells them to divorce. Though Roxie didn’t shoot the victim (and the script by Nunnally Johnson and an uncredited Ben Hecht never for sure tells us who did, though Amos Hart is arrested for the crime at the end after Roxie’s acquittal – oh, did I spoil it?), she decides to confess to the crime anyway but claim she did so in self-defense. A hanger-on named Jake Callahan (Lynne Overman) who claims to be Roxie’s agent arranges for the famous defense counsel Billy Flynn (Adolphe Menjou) to represent her, and Flynn carefully coaches her in her self-defense claim. While Roxie is still in jail awaiting trial, another woman, Gertie “Two-Gun” Baxter (Iris Adrian, who looks amazingly butch for a woman in a 1942 movie and shows up wearing a man’s shirt and blue jeans at a time when almost nobody in movies, aside from actors playing farmers, wore jeans), is suddenly arrested after committing murder in the course of a bank robbery. Roxie feels that the all-important tabloid publicity is slipping away from her and moving to Gertie, so she cooks up the lie that she’s pregnant and thus regains the media spotlight. The trial begins and prosecutor Martin Harrison (Morris Ankrum) amasses enough evidence against Roxie she gets worried that she’s going to hang anyway despite all the pre-trial assurances that the state of Illinois doesn’t execute women. Then Roxie takes the stand herself (something she was initially unwilling to do until Flynn tells her that legendary Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld is in the courtroom) and recites the story she and Flynn have carefully rehearsed – and for some reason Wellman, Johnson, and Hecht didn’t include any scenes of Martin Harrison cross-examining her.

Instead the film cuts to Flynn’s closing argument to the jury, during which Flynn has told her to cry, only he has to tell her to back off when she overdoes it. The moment Flynn takes the bouquet of flowers Roxie has been holding in court, throws it on the ground, and literally crushes it underfoot as he reaches the climactic line in his speech pleading with the jury not to crush both Roxie’s life and that of her unborn (and really nonexistent) baby, he has the jury (who’d already been ogling Roxie through the trial; the jury is all-male, and given that the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote had only been in effect for seven years when this story takes place, that’s not surprising) in the palm of his hands. There’s a cut to two sets of newspapers outside the courtroom, one headlined “ROXIE GUILTY!” and the other “ROXIE FREED!,” and when the acquittal comes through, there’s a hand signal out the courtroom window to signal the paper’s delivery people to release the one with “ROXIE FREED!” as the headline. Only just when Roxie Hart is expecting to bask in the publicity of her new-found freedom, another tabloid-hot case breaks out in the courthouse building and the reporters who’d been following Roxie’s trial suddenly break off and ignore her in favor of the latest headline story. The film ends in 1942, when reporter Homer Howard is being picked up at O’Malley’s bar by a woman in a car. It’s Roxie, of course, and after the trial she married Howard and they’ve been steadily cranking out kids all that time, with another on their way (she tells us that indirectly by saying to Homer that pretty soon they’ll have to get a bigger car).

Roxie Hart also has some other mordant scenes, including ones in which the trial is being photographed by Babe (the young Phil Silvers) and a gang of newspaper guys, who periodically demand at every dramatic moment that the trial pause so they can get a meticulously staged photo of the Big Scene. (You watch these scenes and think it’s no wonder that photographers were banned from trials for many years – and in federal trials, they still are.) There’s also a scene in which Roxie (temporarily) jilts Howard for O’Malley when O’Malley boasts that he has a Packard car – and in the 1942 framing scenes Howard asks O’Malley what happened to that Packard, and O’Malley said he lost it in the 1929 stock-market crash and ensuing Great Depression like everything else he owned. Though it’s not a great film the way the 2002 Chicago is, Roxie Hart has plenty of mordant comments to make about tabloid culture and the transitory nature of fame, especially unearned fame. Ginger Rogers’s performance is sprightly, even though at first my husband Charles mistook her for Barbara Stanwyck (and, as with so many other films of the classic era, it might have been better with Stanwyck as Roxie; a year later Stanwyck and Wellman worked together in Lady of Burlesque, another entertaining tale about the dark side of show business), and her high point is the black-bottom dance she and several other women prisoners perform impromptu in the jail. Though one can fantasize this movie with Fred Astaire playing Billy Flynn and the two of them ending up dancing together on the screen, Rogers’s dancing is first-rate on her own (her and Astaire’s choreographer, Hermes Pan, designed the dances), and this scene may have inspired Fosse and his collaborators on the musical, composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, to stage the spectacular jailhouse production numbers in the 1975 Chicago musical.

Inspector George Gently: "Gently Through the Mill" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, 2009)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I turned back to regular TV for an episode of the interesting 2007-2017 British TV policier Inspector George Gently, which I hadn’t realized when I watched last week’s quite impressive episode “Gently in the Blood,” originally aired January 4, 2009 that I’d actually seen before. I’d caught a few previous episodes in the mid-2010’s when they aired locally on KPBS closer to their original showings in Britain. After “Gently in the Blood” I was expecting great things for this week’s show, “Gently Through the Mill,” but I was a bit disappointed even though it was still entertaining in its own right. “Gently Through the Mill” begins with the death by hanging of mill manager Patrick Fuller (Joe Duttine) in the north of England. The mill produces flour, and for over 150 years it had been owned by the Fuller family. Then it fell on hard times economically, the Fullers didn’t have the capital to upgrade the equipment, and so Patrick Fuller was pressured into selling out. The buyer – though we’re not told this until halfway through the episode – was Labour politician Geoffrey Pershore (Tim McInnerny), who as the show opens is in the middle of a hard-fought campaign to unseat the local Member of Parliament, Conservative Nicholas Mundy (Trevor Cooper), who seems to regard the seat as his by matter of divine right. The election was just two days away when Fuller died, ostensibly by suicide, though of course Inspector George Gently (Martin Shaw) and his younger sidekick, detective sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingolby), suspect he was murdered because, among other things, he didn’t leave a suicide note. Writer Mick Ford, adapting a novel by Alan Hunter (creator of Gently and the other recurring characters), certainly created an ample suspect pool (something my husband Charles noticed even though he was working on a computerized class during the first half-hour and joined me only for the rest) and a dizzying array of potential motives.

It turns out that Patrick Fuller had been having an affair at work, not with his hot-shot 17-year-old secretary Julie (Kate Heppel), but with Mrs. Blythely (Anne Hornby), wife of his long-time best friend Henry Blythely (Nicholas Jones). Unfortunately, they’d been caught kissing in the mill by Sam Draper (Tom Goodman-Hill), who used his knowledge to blackmail Fuller into giving him the job of mill foreman over the younger and more qualified Jed Jimpson (Justin McDonald), who when he isn’t working at the mill is a firebrand for Geoffrey Pershore’s campaign. Midway through the episode Sam Draper’s dead body is found floating in the river after having been apparently struck with several blows to the skin. There’s also the issue of what happened to the petty-cash fund in Fuller’s office safe, which wasn’t found when his body was. Gently’s and Bacchus’s search for the killer reaches a dead end when it turns out that most of the principals, including Patrick Fuller himself, were Freemasons. Bacchus deduces that Masonry had something to do with the suspicious deaths, and when Gently tells him that the only people Masons will talk to about the events of the case are other Masons, Bacchus determines to join the local order and worm the secrets out of whoever he can meet through the lodge. We get some nice shots of Lee Ingolby wearing a shirt off the shoulder as part of the initiation ritual (generally Ingolby was the sexiest man in the cast of these productions, though here both Tom Goodman-Hill and Justin McDonald were giving him runs for the money in that department). As part of the ritual, Bacchus is blindfolded (which reminded me of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, which was written by two Masons, Mozart and librettist Emanuel Schikanader) and a dagger is first pressed to his open chest and then pushed across his throat, when he’s given the solemn warning that his throat will be slashed end to end if he ever reveals the secrets of Masonry to anyone outside the order.

At the Masonic ceremony Bacchus meets the man whose activities perpetrated the murder: Maurice Hilton (Alan McKenna), a food inspector who found that conditions at the local mill were unsafe. Hilton was about to issue a report condemning the mill as unsafe and ordering it to be shut down until all its equipment was replaced and sanitary safeguards were put in place. But Pershore, the supposed friend of the workers, bribed Hilton into suppressing his report, though Pershore kept the one copy as “insurance” should Hilton ever try to report him to the authorities. A bad batch of flour got released during the process and 19 people got food poisoning from it, including one who died. Meanwhile the Masons were working on behalf of Nicholas Mundy (ya remember Nicholas Mundy?), who was a Mason himself, to try to figure out Pershore’s dark, deadly secret and worm it out of him or his associates to destroy him politically. Ultimately it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Fuller’s death actually was a suicide, but Draper was murdered by Jed Jimpson when he threatened to expose both Pershore and Jimpson for having bribed the health inspector to let the unsafe mill stay open. Jimpson knocked Draper into a railing at a bridge over the river by the mill (the mill had been open so long it probably still ran on water power when it was first built), and he and Pershore pitched Draper’s body into the river so his death would appear to have been an accident. It gets even wilder from there; it turns out that the man who died from the food poisoning caused by Pershore’s refusal to close the mill (which he rationalized by saying he hadn’t wanted to put his workers out of their jobs while the mill was being modernized to be safe) was [double spoiler alert!] Jimpson’s father. Jimpson had rationalized his dad’s death some months before by attributing his liver failure to his long-term alcoholism, but the shock of realizing that his supposed mentor had actually killed his father, albeit indirectly, sends him into a murderous rage. He breaks open a bottle and is about to stab Pershore to death with it when Gently and Bacchus get the bottle out of Jimpson’s hand and arrest both him and Pershore. I should have known that Alan Hunter and Mick Ford would not only make Pershore literally “too good to be true” but reveal him as the villain at the end, and there’s a certain cynicism about politicians in general and politicians who masquerade as “friends of the people” when in fact they’re anything but that specifically.

White with Fear (So Much Film, Spring Bird Productions, Gateway Film Center, Roco Films, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, March 24) KPBS ran an unusually compelling and quite chilling documentary called White with Fear, produced, directed, and written by Andrew Goldberg and dedicated to the proposition that (as I’ve argued previously in my zengersmag blog posts) the real origin of the Right-wing movement that eventually elected Donald Trump to the Presidency not once but twice (heaven help us all!) was in the late 1960’s, when Richard Nixon ran for President for the second time in 1968 and won. Goldberg’s presentation noted the white racialist terror that became widespread in the mid- to late-1960’s as Black ghettoes across the country exploded into riots. He artfully used archival footage to show, among other things, a suburban woman senior citizen in the white suburb of Dearborn, Michigan who bought a gun and taught herself to use it, showing up at target ranges, for fear that her community would be invaded by Black people from nearby Detroit. In 1968 Nixon and U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond (D turned I turned R-South Carolina) concocted what they called the “Southern Strategy” as a response to the threat George Wallace’s independent Presidential candidacy posed to Nixon’s campaign. The “Southern Strategy” turned out far better than expected; it seemed that a large number of working-class whites all across America harbored deep racial resentments and formed a constituency that the Republicans could easily tap into. With the Democrats, formerly the party of slavery, secession, and the Ku Klux Klan, having largely abandoned their racist constituency and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the racist vote was up for grabs and the Republicans gleefully seized on it. Goldberg’s program did an interesting comparison of Nixon and Trump as both being driven by personal resentments. In Nixon’s case it was coming from a hard-scrabble lower-class background in Whittier, California and watching while upper-class elites grabbed all the honors that he thought should have been his; in Trump’s (though Goldberg didn’t make this case explicitly) it was from being the son of a real-estate mogul who’d made his fortune in the outer boroughs of New York City but hadn’t been able to crack Manhattan.

In my own writings I’ve argued that Nixon was the Jekyll-and-Hyde President; Jekyll-Nixon wanted to do good things for the country, like environmental protection (he signed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act into law, which Trump has now eviscerated), national health insurance (Nixon’s proposal was actually more radical than Barack Obama’s and would have covered a lot more people at lower cost), a guaranteed income. Hyde-Nixon did things like keeping the Viet Nam War going at least four years longer than it should have and attempting to rig the 1972 Presidential election in his favor through the myriad of “dirty tricks” that became known collectively as Watergate. The first step in the creation of the modern radical Right in the U.S. was the Nixon/Thurmond “Southern Strategy” in 1968. Nixon ran explicitly on a promise to bring “law and order” back to America – as did Trump in both 2016 and 2024 – and a number of Leftists dredged up this old quote from Adolf Hitler in 1932 (a year before he took absolute power in Germany): “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order. Yes, without law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall restore law and order." In his 1968 and 1972 campaigns, Nixon proved a master of what Goldberg and other commentators before him called “dog-whistle racism,” making appeals to racist voters through coded language like “law and order” and “welfare queens.”

In 1968 Nixon and Wallace together got 57 percent of the vote to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent, a sign that after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win in 1964 (the last time a Democrat won the majority of white voters in a U.S. Presidential election), the U.S. had firmly realigned itself Rightward. In 1972 Nixon won the sort of landslide re-election victory Trump falsely claimed for himself in 2024, carrying every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, at least partly due to the Watergate “dirty tricks” and a fratricidal war within the Democratic Party largely over the Viet Nam war. Despite the GOP’s short-lived near-collapse in the mid-1970’s as a result of Watergate, the Republicans made a sweeping comeback in the 1980 and 1984 elections with Ronald Reagan, who continued Nixon’s successful campaign to win white working-class voters by dog-whistle appeals to their racism. One hugely important thing Reagan did in office was in 1987, when his appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminated the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” that had given broadcast radio and TV stations an obligation to present all sides of a political issue. This allowed the conversion of the AM radio band from music (whose broadcasters had largely abandoned it in favor of the better-sounding FM band) to talk, and by far the most popular talk-radio shows were Right-wing political propaganda from hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, both of whom appear via archival clips in White with Fear. Limbaugh’s shows seem eerily premonitory of Trump’s, both in the sneering contempt and hatred with which he greeted anyone with a different point of view from his and in the fanatical devotion of his followers, who described Limbaugh as “saying what I think” and proudly proclaimed themselves “dittoheads.” Goldberg mentioned Roger Ailes, who was on Nixon’s campaign staff in 1968 and then masterminded Limbaugh’s emergence as a radio and TV star and was present at the creation of Fox News, the cable channel launched in 1995 which brought the Right-wing propaganda and its sneering contempt for anything that could be described as “liberal” or “leftist” to TV. One of the interviewees was an early Fox executive who insisted that the channel be a legitimate news outlet – until Roger Ailes fired him and made it clear that Fox’s mission was to blur the “news” and “editorial” sides into a broad and devastatingly effective propaganda outlet pushing the Right-wing agenda 24/7.

Goldberg mentions various benchmarks in the evolution of America’s radical Right, including the report from the U.S. Census Bureau which predicted that by 2050 (later revised to 2030) more than half the American population would be non-white, which a lot of America’s white people regarded as a harbinger of doom. Also a key element in the Right’s evolution was the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008, which seemed to be a fulfillment of one of racist America’s great fears: one of them is now the leader of this country. Obama’s election and the financial crisis he had to deal with immediately on taking office in turn led to the rise of the “Tea Party,” which swept the Republicans into control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. Goldberg’s documentary includes a clip from CNBC host Rick Santelli’s rant on the floor of the Chicago stock exchange against home borrowers who’d kept up their payments being asked to sacrifice for the sake of ones who hadn’t, which is widely credited with having kicked off the Tea Party. One key index of the influence the radical Right was having over American politics was the so-called “birther” campaign against Obama – led largely by his eventual successor, Donald Trump – that claimed he was “really” born in Kenya and/or that he was really a secret Muslim (though that didn’t stop the Right from attacking his actual Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and accusing him of fomenting racial hatred against whites). It was obviously a thinly veiled racist attack on Obama over the quite visible difference between him and every other American President. Obama got re-elected in 2012, despite confidence among national Republicans that in a low-turnout election (which 2012 was) he would lose.

One of Goldberg’s most interesting interviewees was Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for the RealClearPolitics Web site. After the 2012 election, while most mainstream Republicans were saying that the party needed to broaden its appeal to non-white voters, Trende published an analysis called “The Missing White Voters” saying that Obama had been re-elected because whites who had voted in 2004 and 2008 had sat out the 2012 election. In a follow-up article Trende published after Trump won the 2016 election (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/09/the_missing_white_voters_revisisted_132308.html), Trende wrote, “I reasoned that these were probably people who liked George W. Bush and perhaps John McCain, but were turned off by Mitt Romney’s wealth and patrician air. If Republicans nominated someone with more working-class appeal, I reasoned, these people could be motivated to vote.” Though Trende, both in his 2016 piece and in the White with Fear documentary, disclaimed the message often attributed to him that the Republicans should become a “whites-only” party, he wrote after Trump’s first victory, “[F]or now the best indications are that these voters were, in fact, inspired by a Republican candidate with more blue-collar appeal. Donald Trump did do better with nonwhites than Mitt Romney, which played a significant role in his victory. But there’s little doubt that a strong showing with these rural whites, who are disconnected from the global economy that increasingly defines urban and suburban environs, played a major role in his win.” Trump, for his own part, went Nixon and Reagan one better; instead of dog-whistle appeals to racism, he went for broke and spewed open hatred towards people of color in general and immigrants in particular. Trump’s defenders insist that not everyone who voted for Trump was a racist, but it’s clear that virtually all American voters who are racist supported (and still support) Trump.

Trump has shrewdly turned immigrants into an all-purpose scapegoat the way Adolf Hitler did with Jews. Trump was also able to grow his support among people of color in the 2024 election, notably by hooking them with conservative positions on so-called “culture war” issues. I remember a good Mexican-American friend of mine warning me during the 2016 campaign that a surprising number of U.S. citizen voters of Mexican descent were going to vote for Trump because they thought so-called “illegal aliens” were taking jobs away from them. Goldberg also discusses the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which argues that whites worldwide are falling victim to a demographic trend, masterminded by an international Jewish conspiracy, that is deliberately driving down economic opportunities for whites to boost them for people of color. Though I’m surprised that someone with so obviously Jewish-sounding a name as Goldberg didn’t stress more the anti-Semitic implications of the “Great Replacement Theory” – which, like the racist opposition to the 1960’s African-American civil rights movement, argued that people of color were too stupid and intellectually inferior to organize such movements on their own, so they were dependent on Jews to do it for them – old-fashioned Nazi-style anti-Semitism is at the root of the “Great Replacement Theory” and many of the people who advocate it. There’s an interview with one of Trump’s first-term White House staff members who thought he had arranged for Trump to deliver a full-throated condemnation of anti-Semitism and mob violence at Charlottesville, North Carolina in 2017. Instead Trump, probably advised by his dark eminence Stephen Miller (who wasn’t interviewed for White with Fear the way Steve Bannon was), delivered his now-infamous statement that “there were very fine people on both sides – on both sides.”

White with Fear is an ominous documentary that suggests that America’s radical-Right movement is a force with real staying power and determination to remake America into a Christian nationalist dictatorship in which all the gains women, African-Americans, other people of color, Queer people and especially Trans people will be reversed permanently. When Hillary Clinton, who was interviewed extensively in White with Fear, was debating Donald Trump in 2016, she asked him point-blank when he thought America had been “great” and to which he wanted to return to “make America great again.” Since then it’s become readily apparent: the period from 1870 to 1913, before Progressive legislation aimed at restricting the unlimited power of corporate America to treat workers and the environment as disposable commodities. It was also before the income tax (more than once Trump has said he hopes his tariff regime will eliminate the need for the federal government to charge and collect an income tax) and when U.S. Senators were still elected by state legislatures rather than directly by the people (which caused huge levels of corruption, as well-heeled would-be Senators like Leland Stanford of California literally bought their way into the Senate). It was before anyone was conscious of the environment as a political issue and urban dwellers were told that the growing levels of smoke in their cities were signs of “progress.” And of course it was also a time when African-Americans were losing the gains they had made during Reconstruction and being forced back into the position of a permanent service class as whites had always intended when they brought their ancestors here as slaves in the first place; when other Americans of color were being told they were here at the sufferance of whites and that could be revoked at any time when they “got out of line”; when women were being told that their destiny was, as the Nazis put it, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“children, kitchen, church”) and total subservience to the men in their lives (their fathers when they were children and their husbands when they grew up) rather than any independent involvement in society; and Queer people were told they were the spawn of the Devil and they had no legitimate place in the world at all.

Siren of the Tropics (Établissements Louis Aubert, La Centrale Cinématographique, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 22) my husband Charles and I watched a really quirky film as part of Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart: Siren of the Tropics, a bizarre 1927 production from a French studio called Etablissements Louis Aubert, distributed by La Centrale Cinématographique, and a vehicle for African-American cabaret and theatre star Josephine Baker. Born in St. Louis in 1906, Baker made her stage debut there at age 8, and at 13 ran away from home to seek stardom in New York City. She made it as far as the chorus line in the all-Black revues Shuffle Along (1922) and Chocolate Dandies (1924) before she got discovered by a white woman, Caroline Dudley. Dudley was putting together an all-Black show called the Revue Négre for a theatre in Paris and hired Baker as a featured performer. Baker became acclaimed with the Revue Négre and later on at the Folies Bergère in 1926 for her energetic dancing and her shockingly scanty costumes, including one consisting of a skirt of 16 bananas and nothing above it. (The booklet for the Columbia Art Deco Series reissue of Baker’s 1920’s recordings includes a photo of Baker in this costume or one much like it.) She went on to a long if rather up-and-down career, mostly in France except for a few brief trips back to her homeland. She married a Frenchman, industrialist Jean Lion, in 1937 (though they broke up three years later), gave up her American citizenship and became a French national, and died in Paris in 1975. Baker was also an active supporter of the anti-Nazi Resistance and the civil-rights movement, and refused to perform before racially segregated audiences. Siren of the Tropics was hastily thrown together in 1927 as a vehicle for Baker at the peak of her early popularity in France. It had two directors, Henri Étiévant and Mario Nalpas, plus a far more illustrious name in filmmaking history, Luis Buñuel, as assistant director. The script was by Maurice Dekobra, and the first half of the movie had me wondering if he ripped off the basic story from the Biblical tale of King David, Bathsheba, and her husband Uriah. The David character is the Marquis Sévéro (Georges Melchior), who sits around his big house and loafs all day while his wife (Régina Dalthy) takes care of the family business, whatever it is. (Charles joked that all she seemed to do all day was sign executive orders.)

The Marquis demands that his wife agree to a divorce so he can marry his goddaughter, Denise (Regina Thomas, a typically winsome silent-screen heroine), though Denise only has eyes for André Berval (Pierre Batcheff), an engineer in the Sévéro family’s employ. To get rid of his rival, the Marquis drafts a letter to Álvarez (Wladimir Kwanine, though like a lot of Russian actors working in France then he’s billed only under his last name), steward of the Sévéro holdings in the Caribbean. The letter announces that Sévéro is sending André to an island called Monte Puebla to investigate opportunities for prospecting on the Sévero landholdings there. He adds, ominously, “It would suit me very well if Monsieur Berval were never to return to France.” We’re told in the intertitles that Álvarez is a villain and has a secret fortune of which no one knows the origin. The film then abruptly cuts to Monte Puebla, where we meet Josephine Baker at long last. She’s playing a native girl called Papitou, and like most such characters in 1920’s and 1930’s movies (Joan Crawford played a similar role in her first talkie, 1929’s Untamed), Papitou is a wild child with an odd mixture of exuberance and naïveté. Papitou is the daughter of hard-core drunk Diego (Adolphe Canté), who looks white on screen (and even more so in his imdb.com head shot), suggesting that Papitou is mixed-race. As Papitou, Baker gets to do a lot of jumping around, showing off her long legs that made her an excellent dancer, and also showing her tits on screen with a brazenness that would have been strictly forbidden in Hollywood even in the genuinely “pre-Code” era of 1927. André and Papitou have their obligatory meet-cute when he rescues her from Álvarez as Álvarez is trying to rape her, and she’s immediately smitten with him even though he just puts her in the “friend zone.”

When Madame Sévéro and Denise don’t hear from André for a while, they decide to take the ship to Monte Puebla themselves and find out what’s happened to him. Meanwhile André accidentally discovers the secret of Álvarez’s mysterious wealth; all along he’s been mining the Sévéro-owned mountains himself, using a crew of Black workers he treats about the way Alberich treated the Nibelungs in Wagner’s Ring cycle. Eventually Papitou reports Álvarez to the local police, who rescue André from his clutches and arrest Álvarez and his cronies. That happens with half the film left to go, and in the second half Papitou, anxious to get to Paris to be with André, stows away on the ocean liner taking them back there after she finds that she can’t afford anything like the 65,000-franc fare. (There’s a nice scene satirizing the inherent racism of the time and place as Papitou desperately tries to fight her way to the ticket booth, only she’s ignored and swamped by the white people buying tickets for the ship.) At first the boat’s security people describe Papitou as “all-black” until she hides out in the ship’s bakery and gets flour all over her, after which they say she looks “all-white, like a ghost.” She’s caught, but is rescued by a white woman who hires her to serve as governess for her multitude of children – and both Charles and I noticed the eerie anticipation of Baker’s own future as the adoptive mother of the so-called “Rainbow Tribe” of 12 children (though all the kids in the film were white while Baker’s were of different races), whom she spent so much money on she was forced into bankruptcy despite her lucrative stage career. The woman agrees to pay for Papitou’s passage, and later two theatrical producers discover her and decide she has the makings of a great dancing star. She agrees but only on the condition that André Berval will be there for her opening. Luckily that proves easier than you’d expect, because at the insistence of his wife, Marquis Sévéro has finally agreed to let André marry Denise and host a reception for them.

The announcement of the engagement hits the newspapers, and the producers arrange for the reception to be at the music hall where Papitou will be performing. She does a wild dance on stage, but backstage there’s the inevitable misunderstanding in which Denise becomes convinced that André is in love with Papitou and breaks their engagement. Ultimately Papitou realizes that André is only in love with Denise, and under the inspiration of a verse from André’s prayer book (which he inherited from his mother) hailing the nobility of sacrifice, Papitou gives him up and gives what the titles declare is her last show in Paris. (They don’t say what happens to her after that; maybe we were supposed to believe she returned to Monte Puebla, though I’d rather it had ended like Greta Garbo’s first American film, Torrent, in which Garbo’s character accepted losing the man she loved to another woman and continued her lucrative stage career as an opera singer.) Siren of the Tropics is an uneven movie whose first half is considerably more entertaining than its second, though the second half still has the virtue of preserving at least a slice of Baker’s spectacular theatre act. The version we were watching was a reissue from 2005 by Kino Lorber who hired Donald Sosin to do the music score. Sosin backed most of the film with his own piano, but for the scenes in Monte Puebla he shifted to guitar. About the only glitch in his underscoring was his decision to back Baker’s actual stage performances with a raucous mixture of modern-day Dixieland jazz and 1940’s rhythm-and-blues (the R&B influence is particularly apparent in the shuffle beats Sosin’s drummer played). I wish that Sosin had instead referenced Baker’s own records from the period for the right orchestral sound for her numbers. Oddly, though the film was a hit, Josephine Baker didn’t make another one for seven years, until Zou Zou (1934), by which time sound had come in and we got to hear her sing in French. Ironically Baker’s rather thin voice, with its light, fast vibrato, sounded better in French than it did in English, even though English was her native language and she hadn’t started recording in French until the early 1930’s, when she felt comfortable enough with French to sing in it. While nowhere near as good as Baker’s two other films, Zou Zou and the even wilder Princesse Tam Tam (1935), Siren of the Tropics is an estimable film and a good if rather quirky showcase for the personality of its highly talented but rather unlikely star.

Who Killed Teddy Bear (Phillips Productions, Magna Corporation, 1965)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, March 21) Turner Classic Movies blessedly returned Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” showcase to its normal Saturday night schedule with a quite unusual and bizarre movie: Who Killed Teddy Bear (the original poster art has a question mark at the end of the title but the actual film credits don’t). It was made in 1965 (a bit late in the day for film noir) by two independent production companies, Phillips Productions and Magna Corporation, with Joseph Cates as director, Arnold Drake and Leon Totakyan as writers, and Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse, both of whom had fallen short of their potentials in Hollywood’s big leagues and now were at the stage of having to take whatever they could get, as the stars. The personnel behind the camera had unusual career trajectories. Cates was basically a TV producer and director who was apparently involved in the original concept of The Honeymooners and reportedly suggested Art Carney as Jackie Gleason’s second lead. He broke into feature films with Girl of the Night (1960), which starred Anne Francis as a prostitute exploited by her madam (Kay Medford), which seems like a film I’d like to see – especially since Lloyd Nolan, one of my favorite actors, was the male lead. Arnold Drake was mostly a comic-book writer, who worked at DC until 1962, when he jumped ship to the renascent Marvel company because they were developing superhero characters with more depth and complexity than the ones at DC. And like Cates, Leon Tokatyan was mostly a TV talent who’d never worked on a feature film before until this one. The cinematography was by Joseph Brun, who had worked with director Cates before on Girl of the Night and had also shot Odds Against Tomorrow and, of all unlikely credits, Flipper. The music score was by Charles Callelo but the songs danced to at the discothèque where the central characters work were co-written by Bob Gaudio, original member of The Four Seasons who wrote most of their big hits, and Al Kasha. I’d seen this film once before with my husband Charles on a low-quality bootleg VHS from a company in Canada and hadn’t been particularly impressed by it, but this time around it seemed quite good, especially for the low-budget exploitation genre. It was certainly considerably better than Satan in High Heels (1962), which Charles and I watched on YouTube after the original soundtrack album by guitarist Mundell Lowe turned up on a Lowe compilation and in the Charlie Parker Records box (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/05/satan-in-high-heels-vega-productions.html).

The plot centers around a disco run by Marian Freeman (Elaine Stritch, a major Broadway star who never got the breaks in film she deserved) where Nora Dain (Juliet Prowse), a girl from Rochester who like so many before (and since) came to the Big Apple seeking stardom, works as a D.J. (She’s not very good by modern standards; though the club has two turntables she abruptly cuts from one record to the next and doesn’t cross-fade them the way a modern D.J. in a dance club is expected to.) Also employed at the club as a general assistant and hanger-on is Lawrence “Larry” Sherman (Sal Mineo). Nora lives in an apartment she’s subletting from another young woman who’s actually on the road with a touring company of a Broadway show, and she’s constantly being interrupted and awakened at night by obscene phone calls. The calls are from a man who speaks in a whispery voice and tells her in breathy tones exactly what he’d like to do to her body. Naturally she’s creeped out by the calls and reports them to the New York Police Department, where the case is taken by a lieutenant named James Madden (a boy named Jan Murray, who was usually a stand-up comedian on TV). We know from the get-go that Larry Sherman is Nora’s mystery phone stalker – after all, he knows her name and has her home phone number – but it takes half the movie before that’s revealed for sure. We also see that Lt. Madden has an extensive collection of literature about perverse sexuality, including complete versions of such famous bits of erotica as Fanny Hill and Naked Lunch as well as non-fiction works by Krafft-Ebing and more recent and less cachet-ridden pornographers. (These scenes were targeted by the Legion of Decency, the censorship arm of the Roman Catholic Church, and in order to get the Legion to lift its “C” rating, which made it literally a sin for a Catholic to see this film, the filmmakers cut about three minutes from them.) As Lt. Madden continually invites Nora to stay with him, she starts to get the impression that he is her cyber-stalker until he explains that his wife was kidnapped, gang-raped, and killed three years earlier. The culprits were never caught, and this led Madden to undertake a massive research project on the sexual underground in hopes of finding his wife’s killers. (At this point we’re wishing the NYPD would create the Special Victims Unit – or, as it’s called in real life, the Sex Crimes Unit – already.) We also learn that Larry Sherman lives in a run-down apartment with his – whatever the correct euphemism is these days for the “R”-word? “Developmentally disabled”? “Developmentally challenged”? – younger sister Edie (Margot Bennett), who’s 19 but acts about 8.

In his introduction Eddie Muller noted that Who Killed Teddy Bear is probably the kinkiest film noir ever made, at least until the Production Code finally collapsed in 1968 and it became possible for major studios to make films like Chinatown. Just about every character in it except Nora has a sexual obsession of some sort, and there are long scenes of Larry walking the streets of Greenwich Village looking through the windows of adult bookstores, examining their merchandise without actually buying anything, and at one point going into a porn theatre showing something called Call Girl 77 only to walk out again after a few minutes because whatever the movie is offering isn’t sufficient to tame his obsessions. There’s also a quirky scene in which Carlo (Daniel J. Travanti 16 years before he became a TV star playing a cop on Hill Street Blues), who works at a bouncer at the disco, confronts and ejects a heavy-set customer (Rex Everhart) who’s obnoxiously hitting on Nora. Unfortunately, the person he ejected is carrying a switchblade and … we never see the violence go down but the next time we see Carlo he’s got a stab wound in his neck, and the police have taken him into custody and are grilling him as if he were the assailant. Also there’s a scene in which Lt. Madden and his daughter Pam (Diane Moore) take Nora to the local children’s zoo (where the tickets are just 10 cents each – once again, isn’t inflation a bitch!), where they run into Larry and Edie and have a rather quirky and unsettling interaction with them. The climax starts when Marian offers to spend the night with Nora in her apartment, only to make a Lesbian pass at her, which Nora, being the good girl to end all good girls (at least by the standards of this kinky context), righteously rejects and throws her out. Marian is accosted on her way home by an unrecognizable assailant who may or may not be Larry (though it probably isn’t since him she would have recognized) and killed. For some reason the police decide that her killer must be a Trans person, so in a scene that has aspects of “the usual suspects” about it they interrogate at least two men, one of whom, Adler (Tom Aldredge), collects women’s stockings while the other, Frank (Bruce Glover), picks up women’s hats and handbags.

Ultimately Larry makes his long-awaited move on Nora and the police give chase in a scene director Cates filmed clandestinely on the streets of New York, where the traffic was real. At one point Larry leaps over an outdoor rail to escape the cops, and apparently Sal Mineo had to do that for real to avoid the oncoming traffic that threatened to do him in. Ultimately the cops shoot him down in the street and leave him to die. Who Killed Teddy Bear, whose title comes from an incident in a pre-credits prologue in which Edie Sherman falls down a flight of stairs and tears open her teddy bear in the process (remember that she’s 19 but acts well below her age), is actually a quite good thriller. Joseph Cates turns in a well-oiled bit of suspense direction, and the script is believable even though the writers were obviously constructing it for the maximum level of sexual shock value you could get into a 1965 American movie. Eddie Muller’s intro criticized Sal Mineo’s performance as too imitative of Marlon Brando (on whom Mineo, naturally, had a crush), but for me that’s one of the strengths of this movie. Watching scrawny little Sal Mineo trying to assume the mannerisms and project the brute strength of the larger, more butch Brando is one of the delights of this film. There’s even a scene in which Larry is working out at a public gym and there’s a shot of the weight machine’s piston going up and down in an obvious phallic symbol. Though Who Killed Teddy Bear is one of those movies that seems patched together from bits and pieces of other films – the vengeance motive of the cop is straight out of Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat and Elaine Stritch’s Lesbian pass at Our Heroine seems to come from Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Walk on the Wild Side three years earlier – overall Who Killed Teddy Bear is a quite remarkable movie and an especially good example of the exploitation genre that almost never produced anything of lasting worth and value; this time it did!