Bachelor Mother (RKO, 1939)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 26) my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies from a mini-marathon they were doing of movies about abandoned children raised by others than their biological parents. Among them were the 1920 Charlie Chaplin masterpiece The Kid (alas in what’s become the standard version, severely edited by Chaplin himself in the early 1970’s when he prepared his films for re-release; if you can find a public-domain print of this quite remarkable movie, grab it because Chaplin’s original cut is a deeper, richer work than the chopped and channeled version which has become standard); and Baby Boom, described on Wikipedia as “a 1987 American comedy-drama film directed by Charles Shyer, written by Nancy Meyers and Shyer, and produced by Meyers and Bruce A. Block for United Artists. It stars Diane Keaton as a yuppie who discovers that a long-lost cousin has died, leaving her a 14-month-old baby girl she named as inheritance.” The first of the two we actually watched last night was Bachelor Mother from 1939, made at RKO and directed by Garson Kanin (the evaporation of Kanin’s briefly promising directorial career – it was interrupted by World War II and never resumed because Kanin demanded final cut on any future directorial projects – is one of Hollywood’s minor tragedies) from a script by Norman Krasna based on a story by Felix Jackson. The star is Ginger Rogers, playing a shopgirl named Polly Parrish who’s hired as a seasonal employee by the Merlin and Son department store to handle the Christmas rush. On her way to work one day she passes an orphanage and sees a baby boy left on the doorstep. She picks it up to try to get it in a less exposed position, then knocks on the door of the orphanage and offers them the baby. The people staffing the place immediately assume that Polly is actually the baby’s mother and she’s trying to palm the child off on them. They tell her in no uncertain terms that she should be ashamed of herself for trying to get rid of “her” baby. Her plight attracts the attention of store owner John B. Merlin (Charles Coburn) and his scapegrace son David (David Niven, delivering a droll comic performance that obviously marked him for biggers and betters), whose overall irresponsibility is depicted by him arriving for work at the store at 1 p.m. and telling everybody, “Good morning,” when it’s actually the afternoon. David is depicted as a wastrel with a penchant for drinking, nightclubbing, and womanizing, and dad as an exasperated father who wants his son to shape up and get ready to inherit the store. (One annoyance of this movie is that it’s hard to believe from seeing the two of them together that Charles Coburn could have fathered David Niven, but that’s a common problem with a lot of movies, old and new: we’re asked to believe that two people who look almost nothing alike are biologically related.)

David offers to make Polly a permanent employee as long as she keeps the baby. Fortunately Polly’s landlady, Mrs. Weiss (Ferike Boros), is sympathetic to her plight so at least she doesn’t have to worry about day care (the bane of single motherhood then and now). One of Polly’s co-workers, Freddie Miller (Frank Albertson), offers her a date on Christmas Eve entering a dance contest in which he’s arranged for a guaranteed second-prize victory, which will net them $25 each. (For a movie made when Ginger Rogers’s main career priority was to get herself off the dance floor with Fred Astaire and get the studio and the audience to take her seriously as an actress, this movie sure goes out of its way to show her dancing, both in this opening scene and in a later one in which she and David Merlin are out together and one of David’s friends grabs her and does a dance with her.) On her way to her date at the dance club, the “Pink Slipper” (its exterior seems to be patterned on the real-life Roseland in New York), she drops the baby at the Merlins’ home, and David is shocked by her cavalier attitude and threatens not only to fire her but to blacklist her from work at any other department store if she doesn’t keep the kid. Polly concocts a story about the baby’s father being an abusive ex who once threw a coffee pot at her. Freddie Miller gets a promotion from stock clerk to assistant floorwalker, which he thinks Polly arranged for him through an “in” with David (he actually just got the job through seniority), only he blows it when he identifies David as a shoplifter and has the store’s security people knock him down and threaten to turn him over to the police. The mixup came over a Donald Duck doll, which is depicted as that year’s big Christmas toy item (and which RKO could use because they were Walt Disney’s distributors at the time). There’s a funny scene in which Polly tells David that the store’s so-called “exchange” department never exchanges anything, and David sets out to prove her wrong by disguising himself and exchanging his broken Donald Duck doll for a new one. When he fails, he grabs a doll off the counter, and that’s when Freddie decides he’s a shoplifter and takes aggressive action against him. Pissed off that he’s been demoted to a stock clerk again, Freddie writes an anonymous note to John B. Merlin hinting that his son David is the father of Polly’s baby. David offers to reinstate Freddie as assistant floorwalker if he’ll claim that he is the baby’s dad, while Mrs. Weiss enlists her son Jerome (Leonard Penn) to pose as the father.

The various would-be dads parading through his office just makes John Merlin more convinced than ever that David is the father and therefore the baby is John’s long-awaited grandson. John threatens a legal onslaught against Polly to force her to relinquish custody to him. Meanwhile, New Year’s Eve rolls around and David, stood up for a date, asks Polly to go out with him, and the two end up kissing in Times Square. (Oddly the film does not include the famous ball drop even though Mystery of the Wax Museum, made six years earlier, does. Maybe Kanin, Krasna, and the “suits” at RKO wanted to keep the year all this took place ambiguous.) The film ends with David proposing marriage to Polly and she accepting. Not surprisingly, RKO had a lot of trouble with the Production Code Administration and its chief enforcer, Joseph L. Breen, over this movie. The basic concept of a young single woman stuck with both a baby that isn’t hers and the reputation of being a “bad woman” for having conceived a child out of wedlock seems like an in-your-face defiance of the Production Code, and Breen fought the filmmakers throughout the making of Bachelor Mother. Among the deletions he ordered was the final line Kanin and Krasna wanted Ginger Rogers to say as her character accepted David’s proposal: “Wait till you see the surprise I’ve got for you!” Kanin actually shot the scene with that line intact, maybe hoping he could bully Breen into submission the way David O. Selznick had with the infamous final line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” in Gone with the Wind. But Breen was unmoved and ordered the line deleted for fear it would imply that Polly and David had had premarital sex and she’d got genuinely pregnant by him. Frankly, my dears, I was expecting a plot twist in which the baby actually turned out to be David Merlin’s son and the biological mother one of his former paramours, but there was no way Breen would have let them go there. Even with the Code-mandated deletions, Bachelor Mother is a delightful film, with a finely honed performance by Ginger Rogers and a nicely droll one from David Niven. It’s not one of the classics of screwball comedy (a genre that became popular in the 1930’s because it allowed actors who weren’t generally known as comedians to make people laugh on film), but it is solidly entertaining and smartly directed by Kanin.

Stella Maris (Mary Pickford Company, Artcraft, 1918)

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

After Bachelor Mother on Saturday, July 26 Turner Classic Movies showed a film that was a genuine masterpiece: Stella Maris, made in 1918 by director Marshall A. “Mickey” Neilan for Mary Pickford’s production company and released through Artcraft Pictures, Paramount’s higher-end label. It was based on a 1913 novel by British writer William John Locke and was scripted by Pickford’s favorite writer and close friend, Frances Marion. It cast Mary Pickford in a dual role: as Stella Maris, a well-to-do girl disabled from birth, unable to walk and permanently bedridden; and Unity Blake, a scapegrace orphan in London with a penchant for getting into trouble. Stella’s family, her aunt Eleanor Blount (Ida Waterman) and uncle Sir Oliver Blount (Herbert Standing), have decided deliberately to keep her isolated from the rest of the world and its troubles and make sure everything in her environment is sweetness and light. Her and Unity’s plot lines intersect when one of Stella’s friends, journalist John Risca (sometimes spelled “Riska” – the intertitles are inconsistent), is married to a scapegrace woman named Louisa (Marcia Manon), who adopts Unity with the intent to turn her into a Cinderella-style household drudge. We immediately know Louisa is a “bad girl” when we see her smoking – in 1918 it was still considered shocking to see a woman smoke a cigarette. She’s also an alcoholic, and much later in the film we see her with a hypodermic needle and other drug paraphernalia on her bedside table: a clear depiction of addiction in this genuinely “pre-Code” era. Louisa sends Unity out with a shopping basket and some money to buy groceries, but Unity is attacked by a street gang and her purchases stolen. This angers Louisa so much she literally beats Unity within an inch of her life, and the domestic violence call is answered by the same police officer who earlier had refused to help Unity because there was nothing he could do for her. The upshot is that Louisa is arrested and sentenced to three years for assault, while Unity is returned to the orphanage. Meanwhile, a super-surgeon (Gustav von Seyffertitz) tells the Blounts that he can perform an operation on Stella that will enable her to walk for the first time in her life. The Blounts agree to authorize the operation even though it means that Stella’s blessed isolation from the evils of the world will end and she’ll be confronted with all the uglinesses of human nature, including World War I, which was still going on when this film was made. Three years pass, during which Stella’s recuperation is complete, she and John Risca realize they are in love with each other, but when Stella is confronted by Louisa Risca and she tells her that she and John are married, Stella’s already stretched faith in human nature is snapped completely and she decides John is just another of the liars who have deceived her all her life.

Stella Maris explores surprisingly dark territory for a film of its vintage, and while its plot is too sentimental to qualify as proto-noir, director Neilan and cinematographer Walter Stradling (uncle of ace cinematographer Harry Stradling), whose promising career was cut short when he suddenly died of pneumonia on July 4, 1918 just after he shot this film, shoot much of it, particularly in the darker second half of the story, in full-out noir style, with the characters’ faces in half-shadow and an overall chiaroscuro look unusual in a 1918 film, especially one made before The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the other German Expressionist classics that pioneered the “look” of film noir. Neilan and Stradling also worked out some surprisingly convincing double-exposure shots to show the two Mary Pickford characters in the same frame, at a time when special effects were so primitive the only way to show the same person onscreen twice was to mask off half the film, shoot one character, rewind the film in the camera, change the mask to the other side, and shoot the scene with the other. Stella Maris’s plot plays so far against the clichés of the time it’s not always clear how this film could end, but ultimately [spoiler alert!] Unity, in unrequited love with John Risca herself and incensed when Louisa declares her intent to make both his and Stella’s lives miserable forever, shoots her and then herself, thereby freeing John and Stella to get married. The 1918 Stella Maris is a quite remarkable film, proof that Mickey Neilan was as great a director as Gloria Swanson and others who worked with him said he was (though given Louisa Risca’s plot line in the film it’s almost unbearably ironic that Neilan was himself an alcoholic who drank himself out of a major career). It was remade, again as a silent, by Universal in 1925 with Mary Philbin (ingénue lead in the original 1925 The Phantom of the Opera), as Stella and Unity and Elliot Dexter as John Risca, but so far no one has taken it on since: a pity because the story, as far-fetched as it is, is also deeply moving and well worth telling. The whole plot device of Stella being carefully protected by her guardians from the world and all its ugliness reminded Charles of the origin story of Buddha – a prince who was carefully shielded from the outside world and the depradations of humanity until one day he escaped – while it reminded me of Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera Iolanta, in which the family of a girl blind from birth keep her carefully isolated so she won’t know that sight exists at all and therefore will remain in blissful ignorance of what she’s missing. Stella Maris is an extraordinary film, and should be required viewing for anyone who still believes that silent movies were a swamp of overacting. Mary Pickford’s performances as both Stella and Unity are models of understatement, and aside from Conway Tearle, who’s easy enough on the eyes but (like a lot of other silent-era leading men) a bit too phlegmatic and reserved to deliver the character’s charisma, the other actors (particularly Marcia Manon as the villainess of the piece) are likewise excellent. The 1918 Stella Maris, pieced together by the Mary Pickford Foundation and the archivists of Paramount and the Library of Congress from a full print of the original negative and a partial print with color tinting and toning, is a real gem of a film and I’m glad I finally caught up with it!

They Won't Believe Me (RKO, 1947)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 25) Turner Classic Movies presented on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying film called They Won’t Believe Me, a film noir (or at least a film gris, my term for a movie that attempts to be noir but doesn’t quite make it) directed by Irving Pichel from a script by Jonathan Latimer based on a story by Gordon McDonell. It stars Robert Young as Larry Ballentine, who married a woman named Greta (Rita Johnson) for her money and then cut a swath through any of the ranks of humanity that were young, female, and sexually available. The original poster said of Young’s character, “He lived a lie that led him from one disastrous love to another!,” and for once the original poster got it right. His first extra-relational partner, at least the first one we see, is Janice Bell (Jane Greer), a staffer for a photo magazine whom he romances in New York. Unwilling to break up Larry’s marriage, Janice requests that the magazine transfer her to Montréal. Larry insists he’ll follow her there and divorce Greta so the two can get together, but Greta finds his train ticket, deduces his plans, and ends up on the train with them. Greta offers to buy Larry a one-quarter interest in a brokerage in Los Angeles run by a man named Trenton (Tom Powers). He slacks off on his job because he’s too busy cruising Trenton’s secretary, Verna Carlson (Susan Hayward), though Verna saves Larry’s bacon at the company by writing a letter to a major client, in Larry’s name, proposing a new investment strategy. Eventually Larry and Verna start dating even though Trenton, a bachelor, is also interested in her and Larry and Verna have to sneak around behind both Trenton’s and Greta’s backs to see each other. Greta discovers the affair and responds by buying her and Larry a house from an old Spanish land grant in Tulare County, California, where she keeps them isolated from all other humanity, especially all other female humanity. But her plan to isolate him goes awry when she decides to have a guest house on the property so her aunt, Martha Hines (Lillian Bronson), who despises Larry, can stay with them. This gives Larry an excuse to drive to L.A., ostensibly to meet with the architect for the addition but really to see Verna again. Ultimately Larry and Verna work out a plan whereby the two will run off together to Nevada, Larry will divorce Greta, and he and Verna will get together. To finance their new life, Larry decides to loot $25,000 from the $30,000 he and Greta have in a joint bank account, though Verna virtuously tears up the check.

Unfortunately, on their way to Nevada, their car crashes into an out-of-control truck (its driver got a flat tire). Larry survives the accident but Verna is incinerated when the car catches fire and explodes. The cops find a cheap brass wedding band Verna had bought at a drugstore and tell Larry that’s all that’s left of her. Larry decides to pass off Verna’s remains as Greta’s, so he’s now officially a widower in full possession of Greta’s fortune even though Greta is still alive. At least we think that’s what’s happened, but in the meantime Greta has read Larry’s note saying he’s leaving her and she responds by … well, it’s not clear whether she deliberately commits suicide or just dies accidentally in an isolated section of the ranch, but either way she’s really most sincerely dead. Larry deduces the location of her body and tosses it into a nearby stream. Unfortunately for Larry, his former partner Trenton has decided to go all Javert on him; Trenton is convinced Larry murdered Verna and recruits Janice Bell (ya remember Janice Bell?) to return to L.A. and romance Larry to get his secrets from him. Larry falls for it and resumes his affair with Janice until he overhears her and Trenton talking about the plan. Trenton and two L.A. police detectives he’s contacted end up discovering the nearly lifeless body of Greta’s favorite horse, a white Palomino, still alive but with both front legs broken. The cops shoot the horse to put it out of its misery and then discover a human female body, which they assume is Verna’s instead of Greta’s since Greta had already been ruled legally dead in or near Nevada and the body is too badly decomposed to make identification possible. All this is narrated by Larry Ballentine himself during his trial for Verna’s murder, and in a surprise ending [spoiler alert!] Larry becomes convinced that the jury will find him guilty. He tries to evade justice by throwing himself out of a window in the multi-story courthouse, and just after he’s dead, irony of ironies, the jury’s verdict is read in court and it’s “not guilty.” In Jonathan Latimer’s original script the ending is clearly depicted as a suicide, but the Production Code Administration ruled that RKO and its producer, Joan Harrison, couldn’t have Larry evade justice by killing himself. Instead Larry is killed by a trigger-happy bailiff who “reads” his suicide attempt as an escape and shoots him to death in the courtroom.

I’d seen They Won’t Believe Me once before in the 1970’s and hadn’t liked it. I still don’t like it, partly because Robert Young is just too smarmy to be believable as a cad character (George Sanders would have been ideal for the role, even though audiences would have “read” him too soon) and partly because it’s like a modern movie in that none of the characters are particularly likable. One thing I didn’t know about the movie is that I’d previously seen it only in an 80-minute cut version prepared by RKO in the 1950’s so they could use the film as a “B” second feature on double bills. The version on TCM last night was a restored master of the original 95-minute release version. Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” introduction made a great deal of the fact that the film was produced by a woman, Joan Harrison, who had “made her bones” as Alfred Hitchcock’s assistant both in Britain and the U.S. Then she got a producing contract on her own at Universal and had a major hit with Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), a major noir based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Alas, she ran afoul of both the Production Code Administration and Universal’s own preview system on her next project, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), and instead of the morbid ending of the Thomas Job play she was adapting, the studio forced her to accept the old chestnut: “It was all a dream!” Harrison bailed on Universal and signed with RKO, where she produced a number of interesting noirs, including Nocturne (1946) and, on a one-shot return to Universal, Ride the Pink Horse (1947), before her producing career ended in 1951. She was bailed out by her former employer, Alfred Hitchcock, who used her and Norman Lloyd (a one-time actor who’d played the villain in Hitchcock’s 1942 film Saboteur) as co-producers of his long-running TV series.

Muller tried to make a case that owing to Harrison’s presence as a producer, this film had more dimensional female characters than your average noir, and instead of a femme fatale it had an homme fatal in Robert Young’s character. I’d previously used the phrase homme fatal to describe Bruno Anthony, Robert Walker’s character in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), a far, far better movie than They Won’t Believe Me and one that’s considerably kinkier in that the character Bruno ruins with his seductive attentions is also a male. Muller argued that a male producer like Jerry Wald (who salvaged James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce as a Production Code-filmable property by adding a murder Cain didn’t write) or Mark Hellinger could have strong-armed the Production Code people into accepting the original suicide ending of They Won’t Believe Me but a woman like Harrison couldn’t, which seems dubious to me. When it was new They Won’t Believe Me got mixed reviews; James Agee wrote in Time that the film was “a skillful telling of a pretty nasty story ... Thanks to the fact that the ice was broken with ... Double Indemnity, Hollywood can now get by with filming this kind of shabby ‘realism.’ The blessing is mixed ... in this, as in most such ‘adult’ movies, the semi-maturity is well mixed with trashiness.” Robert Young himself recalled in 1968 that They Won’t Believe Me was his only villain role, and the only movie he made that was a box-office flop. (Apparently he’d forgotten his other villain role in Hitchcock’s 1936 British production, The Secret Agent, a major British hit.) The reputation of They Won’t Believe Me has improved in recent years, but it’s still not a movie I care for; Young’s acting is just annoying and the women in his life aren’t much better, though at least Susan Hayward and Jane Greer are electrifying given what they had to work with and this film helped Greer land her next big role as a femme fatale in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past – another film I find overrated. Though Eddie Muller regards Out of the Past as the quintessential film noir, I’d give that honor to Murder, My Sweet (1944), director Edward Dmytryk’s and writer John Paxton’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and Dick Powell’s breakthrough role as an actor and noir icon.

Miss Lulu Bett (Paramount, Artcraft, 1921)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 19) my husband Charles and I watched a quite quirky and interesting film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Night”: Miss Lulu Bett, a 1921 film by William de Mille (Cecil B. DeMille’s older brother) based on a 1920 novel and 1921 play by Zona Gale. Both the author and the director have fascinating backstories. William de Mille was a well-known Broadway playwright whose younger brother Cecil B. DeMille (the two brothers spelled the last name differently) didn’t see any openings for himself in the theatrical world where his brother was an important “name.” So he went into the movies instead and ended up as co-founder of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company and director of The Squaw Man (1914), the first feature-length film shot in the U.S. William, seeing how well his younger brother was doing in the movies, lit out for Hollywood (which became the production capital of American films after Cecil had shot The Squaw Man there) to seek his own fortune in films. I’d seen one William de Mille film before: The Idle Rich (1929) (see my moviemagg blog post at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/03/idle-rich-mgm-1929.html), which I’d given a mixed review of because “I have a hard time with movies whose makers couldn’t decide whether they were comedy or drama, so they tried to make them both and succeed only in making them neither.” Made nine years earlier and with the same screenwriter (Clara Beranger, whose best-known credit today is probably the 1920 John Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), who was an intimate friend of de Mille and became his wife in 1928, Miss Lulu Bett is considerably better balanced between comedy and drama.

Zona Gale had an even more interesting backstory than her director; she was born in 1874 in Portage, Wisconsin, a proverbial Midwestern small town. She became a journalist when she showed up every day at the desk of the city editor of the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin (which creates the impression that Milwaukee is in some other state during the day) for two weeks until he started giving her assignments. Later she moved up to the Milwaukee Journal and in 1901 she moved to New York City and with similar persistence got a job with the New York World while Joseph Pulitzer owned it. As Gale later recalled it, “All of this was so largely sheer adventure and pioneering that none of it now seems to me to have been either will or purpose, but sheer delight.” In 1903 she moved back to Portage and saw her old hometown as a potential setting for fiction, beginning a popular series of novels called “Friendship Village.” Gale was a liberal Democrat and an activist for women’s equality, pacifism (she was a co-founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), and anti-racism. Later, after her mother died in 1923, she became heavily active in spiritualism. Gale published Miss Lulu Bett as a novel in 1920 and adapted it into a play a year later, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama – the first time a woman won it. Though Gale wasn’t directly involved in the film, it carries through her message that sometimes families can become oppressive institutions.

Basically Miss Lulu Bett is an updated version of Cinderella, in which Lulu Bett (Lois Wilson) has been taken in by her tyrannical brother-in-law Dwight Deacon (Theodore Roberts) and his wife Ina (Mabel Van Buren). There are some amusing bits in which Dwight Deacon insists on resetting the wall clock to match his pocket watch, which is 12 minutes fast. The Deacon home is within audible distance of a factory whose whistle signaling the end of the work day lets the Deacons know that the clock was right until Dwight changed it, whereupon Dwight insists that the factory owners deliberately blew the whistle late to grab an extra few minutes of the workers’ time. Lulu has been pressed into service by the Deacons as their unpaid housemaid and, essentially, slave. The Deacons have a mother-in-law (Ethel Wales) staying with them, who may or may not be Lulu’s natural mother (though her last name is “Bett”), and two children of their own, daughters Diana (Helen Ferguson) and Monona (May Giraci). Monona is pre-pubescent but Di (as she’s called throughout the film) is a rambunctious teenager desperate to get away from the stultifying environs of the Deacons’ home and the petty tyrant who rules it. Di is dating a man named Bobby Larkin (Taylor Graves) and makes plans to run off with him and elope. Things change dramatically for Lulu when Dwight Deacon’s brother Ninian (Clarence Burton) comes to town after years of traveling abroad. Ninian takes Lulu on a dinner date – we get the impression that she’s never been on any sort of date before – and goes through a mock wedding ceremony with her that turns out, since there was a justice of the peace at the restaurant to officiate, to be the real thing.

Stuck in a marriage with someone she barely knows and doesn’t love, but also grabbing it as her chance to break away from the stultifying control of the Deacons, Lulu goes through with the marriage and lives with Ninian for a week until he confesses to her that he’s been married before and doesn’t know the whereabouts of his previous wife. Shocked by the idea that she might have unwittingly committed bigamy, since Ninian doesn’t know whether his previous wife is alive or dead, Lulu walks out on him and returns to the Deacons. While she’s been gone the kitchen has become full of dirty dishes and infested with cockroaches (de Mille and cinematographer, L. Guy Wilky, give us a surprisingly detailed and explicit extreme close-up of the infestation), and naturally the Deacons put her back to work to clean up the mess they’ve made of their own home even though they’re also hyper-concerned to make sure the town in general doesn’t learn why Lulu bailed on her marriage so soon. Dwight in particular is worried about the effect the revelation that his brother may be a bigamist will have on the reputation of himself and his family. The Prince Charming in this modern-dress version of Cinderella is Neil Cornish (Milton Sills, who starred in the silent version of Rafael Sabatini’s The Sea Hawk in 1924 and more than held his own in the attractiveness department with Errol Flynn, who played the same role in the 1940 quasi-remake), the local schoolteacher. Charles and I had a rare argument about how the plot would likely resolve; he insisted that the only way Neil and Lulu could get together would be for Ninian Deacon to die. I said that Ninian’s lost wife could turn up, but he said that still wouldn’t resolve the potential that the Deacon family could be scandalized by the revelation that one of them was a bigamist.

There’s an intriguing detour in which Neil and Lulu get wind that Bobby and Di are planning to elope. Bobby runs ahead of her at the train station and buys two tickets, and the station clerk (Charles Ogle, a veteran of the Edison studio where in 1910 he'd become the first actor to play Ebenezer Scrooge and the Frankenstein monster on screen) catches on and guesses he’s eloping. Then Neil and Lulu arrive at the station before Di does – Neil is driving a fish-tailed two-seat car that to a 1921 audience would have marked him as a bit of a sportsman – and Lulu talks Di out of leaving town with Bobby, obviously along the lines of, “Don’t make the same mistake I did.” Then Neil and Lulu declare their love for each other (courtesy of one of Neil’s students, who writes on the chalkboard, “Teacher Loves L,” in quite neat cursive writing when schools still taught that sort of thing) and Lulu finally gets a letter from Ninian saying his wife has been found alive, so his marriage to Lulu is not legally valid and therefore she’s still a single woman and she and Neil can get together legally. The End. Miss Lulu Bett is a quite charming film, ably balanced between comedy and drama, and it marked the start of a long-standing both professional and personal relationship between William de Mille and Clara Beranger; they got married for real in 1928. It’s subtly directed and engagingly acted, even though I couldn’t help but joke, during one scene in which Dwight Deacon is challenging his errant daughter Di to tell him what she was doing going out, referencing Theodore Roberts’s most famous role as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s silent The Ten Commandments (1923), that he’d say, “I’ll get the truth if I have to climb Mount Sinai and ask God personally!”

Woody Guthrie at 100! (Woody Guthrie Publications, Sony Records, 2012)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 18) KPBS aired a tribute show to singer Woody Guthrie called Woody Guthrie at 100!, filmed at a concert at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts on October 14, 2012 (though Guthrie’s actual birthdate was July 14, 1912). This was before the Kennedy Center was traduced and forced, at least for a while, to bear the name of another President, a man Woody Guthrie would have hated – especially since Guthrie’s path actually crossed that of Donald Trump’s notoriously racist father, Fred Trump. In the early 1950’s Guthrie moved into a building owned by Fred Trump, only to learn that Trump’s company had a systematic and out-front policy of not renting to Black people. As a matter of principle, Guthrie not only moved out of Trump’s building but wrote an extra verse to his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” explicitly denouncing Fred Trump’s racism. The concert provided the material for a CD and DVD release at the time containing 19 songs, but predictably the PBS version contained just 12 of the songs in the official release, including Donovan singing Guthrie’s children’s song “Riding in the Car,” which the Scottish folksinger had first recorded for one of his early Pye Records albums in the mid-1960’s. (Pye was a huge label in the United Kingdom, on a level with British Decca and the various imprints of EMI, but its international reputation suffered because it didn’t have a guaranteed distributor in the U.S. Donovan’s Pye recordings were released in the U.S. on Hickory, a label mostly devoted to country music.) One thing I noticed when I started collecting Woody Guthrie’s own recordings is that he frequently performed his songs a good deal faster than later artists covering them. I figured that was because he was singing them well before they’d become Officially Recognized Monuments of American Culture, which led other singers to slow them down radically. I thought of that when the first group on this program, the Old Crow Medicine Show, sped through Guthrie’s “Union Maid” a good deal faster than Guthrie ever played it, though with good results. The second song on the program was “Ramblin’ Reckless Hobo” by San Diego-based folksinger Joel Rafael, who’s made two tribute albums to Guthrie. According to the official Woody Guthrie Web site, https://woodyguthrie.org, “Ramblin’ Reckless Hobo” is Rafael’s own setting of a lyric Guthrie wrote but never set to music himsel

The third song on the version KPBS showed was “Pretty Boy Floyd,” Guthrie’s attempt to elevate a typical 1930’s Western outlaw into a Robin Hood figure, played in a scorching rendition by Johnny Cash’s daughter Rosanne with John Leventhal. (They also did Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home” together, but that wasn’t shown on last night’s version of the program, more’s the pity.) Yes, Rosanne Cash’s face is developing her father’s fabled cragginess, but she’s still a stunning performer. Next up was “I’ve Got to Know,” a relatively obscure Guthrie song, sung brilliantly by the a cappella Black group Sweet Honey in the Rock. After one of PBS’s typically interminable pledge breaks – which were annoying enough even before the Trump administration and the Republican Congress that is totally under his thrall abruptly canceled all federal funding for PBS a year ago – the program resumed with Tom Morello, formerly with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, singing an obscure Guthrie song called “Ease My Revolutionary Mind.” This is an oddball proclamation from Guthrie that he could only live his life with a woman who shared his revolutionary politics, and I briefly wondered if this was one of the songs on the program that wasn’t a Guthrie original but a modern-day song reflecting similar political ideals. It turned out it was a Guthrie song, though Morello tweaked the lyrics a bit to reference more recent phenomena like the Zapatistas (whom he likes) and Fox News (which he doesn’t). I liked the fact that Morello wore a baseball cap with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) logo on it. The next number was Donovan’s “Riding in the Car,” and after that was the high point of the evening: Ani DiFranco with Ry Cooder and Dan Gellert doing the song “Deportee.” It was one of Guthrie’s last songs and he only wrote the lyrics to it: the music was by Martin Hoffman and the song was occasioned by a plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California on January 28, 1948. Guthrie was particularly incensed that the newspaper coverage of the crash listed the names of the plane’s crew but wrote off the passengers as “deportees.” When Hoffman set Guthrie’s poem to music a decade later, Guthrie had already been incapacitated by Huntington’s chorea, the hereditary disease that had crippled and ultimately killed his mother, and it was Guthrie’s friend and frequent collaborator Pete Seeger who introduced the song. Ani DiFranco has always been a performer I’ve admired more than I actually enjoyed – I’ve loved the way she’s been able to build a career for herself totally outside the big music industry, but I’m not that fond of her actual music. On this occasion, though, she sang so emotionally she literally had me crying, especially since we’re hearing this song while the U.S. is under the lash of a megalomaniacal President who feels about immigrants the way Hitler felt about Jews.

After that John Mellencamp came out with “Do Re Mi,” Guthrie’s cynical song about how California seemed like the Garden of Eden to migrants from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, but if they didn’t arrive with money, they were up the proverbial dung creek. After yet another pledge break (usually they play five songs in each segment, but last night they did only four), the show returned with Jackson Browne singing “You Know the Night,” his own song based on a love letter Guthrie wrote to his second wife, Marjorie. Guthrie actually married three times, but Marjorie is the best-known because she was Arlo Guthrie’s mother. She’s also his co-narrator on a quite remarkable CD called Live Wire that was recorded in 1949 and was the only live recording Guthrie left behind. (The title stems from the fact that it was recorded on a wire recorder, a short-lived magnetic recording system that was what existed for home recordings between lacquer discs and tape.) Then The Del McCoury Band with Tim O’Brien came out for a lively version of Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.” Then came the mass numbers featuring the entire ensemble on “This Land Is Your Land,” Guthrie’s most famous song (which he intended as an answer to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”), and “This Train.” Though I can’t find a recording of Guthrie singing “This Train,” it’s a well-known part of his mythos because he drew on it for the title of his 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory. I was particularly curious about how Guthrie might have sung “This Train” because it was originally a gospel song, and though the earliest recording was in 1922 by the Florida Normal and Industrial Institute Quartette (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7zLFDTvrlU&list=RDd7zLFDTvrlU&start_radio=1), it’s best known in a 1939 cover by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT9mwsruFrA&list=RDLT9mwsruFrA&start_radio=1). Tharpe’s version is quite explicit that on the titular train, “Everybody’s ridin’ in Jesus’s name,” and it would be interesting to hear how Guthrie tweaked the words to make them less openly religious. The ensemble numbers included singers whose solo contributions to the original concert had regrettably been deleted, like Judy Collins and Lucinda Williams, and while I for one didn’t miss Williams’s incredibly screechy voice, I do wish the telecast could had included Collins’s version of “Pastures of Plenty,” not only because that’s my all-time favorite Guthrie song but because the bit of Collins we got to hear on “This Land Is Your Land” shows that her remarkable voice has weathered the years exceptionally well.

My search for a Woody Guthrie version of “This Train” didn’t turn up one, but it did come up with some interesting Guthrie broadcasts, including a show that co-starred him with Leadbelly (the Black blues giant, true name Huddie Ledbetter) on a publicly owned radio station in Washington, D.C. on December 12, 1940, accessible on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW__942Wy8s&list=RDpW__942Wy8s&start_radio=1 (and given the gaseous rhetoric we’d been hearing from the pledge-break hosts about how only PBS shows music like this, it was fascinating that in 1940 it was a publicly owned station that was broadcasting this material). Leadbelly played “I Went Rowin’ and My Gal Went Too” and “Frankie and Albert,” a version of “Frankie and Johnny” that’s a good deal more complex morally than the usual one. After Frankie shoots her boyfriend Albert because she caught him with another woman and “he was doing her wrong,” she goes to Albert’s mother pleading for forgiveness – and Albert’s mom refuses to give it to her because whatever Albert was doing with Frankie (or behind her back with someone else), he’d also been supporting her financially and emotionally. Guthrie’s part of the program includes “John Hardy,” a song about a pre-Civil War outlaw in what is now West Virginia who convinced slaves that he could escort them to freedom via mining tunnels; Billy Gashade’s classic ballad “Jesse James”; and a fragment of Guthrie’s own “Tom Joad,” an adaptation of the “John Hardy” melody inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. (Guthrie admits on air that he’s never read The Grapes of Wrath but has seen John Ford’s film version three times, even though film critic Joseph McBride has referred to the movie as “John Ford’s conservative treatment of liberal material.”) The most politically weird item on this broadcast is “Jesse James,” because here one of the most Leftist and anti-racist singers of his generation is singing the praises of a man who before his outlaw career fought with William Quantrill’s guerrilla band in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. (Later Guthrie adapted Gashade’s “Jesse James” into “Jesus Christ,” a song that tried to recover Jesus’s radical legacy against the unthreatening anodyne figure official Christianity had turned him into.) I also uncovered a BBC children’s broadcast on July 7, 1944 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86e90MwKRAQ) recorded in London during Guthrie’s term in the Merchant Marine, in which he enlisted because he didn’t want to serve as just another private in the U.S. Army. On it he sings “Wabash Cannonball” and a traditional folk song called “900 Miles” that later became the basis of the Peter, Paul, and Mary hit “500 Miles” (though the most stunning performance of it I can recall was by a young Bob Dylan under the title “I Was Young When I Left Home”).

The Affairs of Anatol (Cecil B,. DeMille Pictures, Paramount, Artcraft, 1921)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 12) my husband Charles and I watched a particularly interesting and quite good film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Nights”: The Affairs of Anatol (1921), directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Wallace Reid (who in some closeups bore a striking resemblance to James Dean) and Gloria Swanson in a tale loosely adapted from Anatol, an 1893 play by Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler. Like most of DeMille’s early films, it’s actually a sex comedy. The credits insist that the film was merely “suggested” by Schnitzler’s play; Jeanie Macpherson, DeMille’s long-time collaborator, gets credit for the script with Beulah Marie Dix and Elmer Harris acknowledged for “literary assistance,” whatever that meant. Charles and I had seen the film at least once before, the night after we screened the DVD of Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Eyes Wide Shut was also based on a work by Schnitzler (his 1926 book Traumnovelle, which means “Dream Novel”) and, like The Affairs of Anatol, relocated Schnitzler’s story from Vienna to contemporary New York City. I had intensely disliked Eyes Wide Shut, thinking it was the work of a man who had kept himself isolated from the rest of humanity for so long he’d literally forgotten how ordinary human beings behaved. My astonishment over The Affairs of Anatol came largely from how much better DeMille did with Schnitzler’s running themes than Kubrick had. In a previous moviemagg post on The Affairs of Anatol as part of an article I called “10 More Unjustly Neglected Films by Major Directors” (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/07/10-more-unjustly-neglected-films-by.html), I wrote, “Surprise! The Affairs of Anatol turned out to be a far better film in every respect: a more sophisticated script (by Jeanie Macpherson, Beulah Marie Dix and Elmer Harris), superior direction (with half-lit shots, silhouette shots, mirror shots and other tantalizing visual effects) and a more intense and believable cast (Gloria Swanson and Wallace Reid as the central couple and Bebe Daniels standing out as the Satanist). This was DeMille while he was still a major creative director before years of Biblical spectaculars drained him of any real visual acumen and allowed him to coast on the sheer grandeur of his massive sets and hordes of extras.”

Ironically, though Schnitzler hadn’t yet written Traumnovelle when The Affairs of Anatol was filmed, the changes Macpherson, Dix, and Harris made to Schnitzler’s play brought the two stories closer together. Anatol Drew Spencer (Wallace Reid), single in the play (though with a fiancée in the opening scene), is married in the movie. His wife Vivian (Gloria Swanson) is a rather immature woman who expects him to buckle her shoes for her. They’ve been married just 10 months but already they’re getting bored with each other, and Anatol, partly on the urging of his best male friend Max Runyon (Elliott Dexter), decides to look around. The titles make it clear that he’s a Don Quixote type (Cervantes’s hero is name-checked) eager to get involved with other women in an attempt to “rescue” them from their troubles. His first attempted rescuee is actually an old girlfriend of his, Emilie Dixon (Wanda Hawley), who came to New York with aspirations to be an actress. She ran through all her money and got picked up by a sugar daddy, Gordon Brunson (Theodore Roberts, who just two years later would play Moses for DeMille in his first – and better – version of The Ten Commandments), who has lavished jewels on her. Anatol picks up Emilie and moves her into his home, saying that both he and his wife will be happy to help with her reclamation. Anatol hires a music teacher, The Great Blatsky (Raymond Hatton), to teach her violin, only in scenes that eerily anticipate Susan Alexander’s voice lessons in Citizen Kane 20 years later, she plays terribly and shows no acumen for the instrument. (The restoration we were watching, from a film preservation bureau on the island of Malta with help from Paramount Pictures and the Library of Congress, supplies a soundtrack that makes clear how badly she plays.) Anatol demands as part of his condition for helping her that she take all the jewels Brunson gave her and throw them in the river (we see a shot of the Brooklyn Bridge on screen). No fool she, she just dumps the jewelry cases and keeps the jewels themselves. Eventually he comes in on her while she’s throwing a wild party with Brunson and her scapegrace friends, sees her wearing one of the jewelry pieces she supposedly disposed of, and smashes all the furniture in her apartment, most of which Anatol had given her himself (another Citizen Kane anticipation!).

Then Anatol tells his wife Vivian (ya remember Anatol’s wife Vivian?) that he’s disgusted with life in the city and wants them to move to the country where people are decent and honest. Only, as the titles warn us and we could pretty well guess from the overall sense of this film, Anatol is about to run into moral trouble in the country, too. Annie Elliott (Agnes Ayres) is dreaming of fine clothes and furnishings she’s read about in magazines, but her farmer husband Abner (Monte Blue) doesn’t want to pay for them. So she steals money from his strongbox that he actually collected for the local church and uses it to order herself a nightgown. When he realizes how she got the money for it he grabs it out of her hands and throws it to the floor, stomping on it in the process. Abner tells Annie that he’ll probably be arrested for the theft, and, seeing the city slickers Anatol and Vivian and figuring they’ll be good for the money, fakes a suicide attempt. Anatol “rescues” her and gives her his jacket to keep her warm. His jacket contains his wallet, of course, and Annie steals it and gives the money to her husband, being evasive about just where and how she got it. Anatol doesn’t notice his loss until he offers to pay the doctor he summoned to help Annie for his trouble and notices his wallet is missing. The couple return to New York and Vivian decides she’s had enough; she locks Anatol out of their bedroom (there are some quite clever comedy scenes showing him trying to break in via the peephole in the door) and announces that if he can play around, so can she.

Anatol goes to a particularly decadent cabaret where the star performer is a woman who bills herself as “Satan Synne” (Bebe Daniels in a first-rate performance anticipating her role in the first version of The Maltese Falcon 10 years later). The doorway to Synne’s bedroom is emblazoned with the legend, “Those who would sup with the Devil must bring a golden spoon.” Anatol enters Synne’s private bedchamber and she feeds him absinthe and offers him “special” cigarettes to smoke. But it turns out that Synne is really the wife of a soldier who was badly wounded in World War I and is still under increasingly expensive treatments from Dr. Johnston (Winter Hall). The scenes in the hospital are shot and projected in stark black-and-white, a far cry from the rich range of tints, tones, and even full-color stencil effects (though seen only in the credits and intertitles, never in a shot that actually shows movement) with which the rest of the movie is adorned. (The current restorationists worked their proverbial asses off to reproduce the tints, tones, and stencil colors accurately.) While all this is happening, Vivian has fallen in with a hypnotist from India named Nazzer Singh (Theodore Kosloff), who successfully hypnotizes her to take off her three layers of stockings to cross a stream that in fact doesn’t exist. Nazzer Singh reappears at the ending in a scene that Arthur Schnitzler actually used to open his play: announcing that he’s on his way back to India (which causes us to heave a sigh of relief that he won’t turn out to be an alternate lover or sex partner for Vivian), he says his goodbyes to Anatol and Vivian. Anatol challenges him to hypnotize Vivian so he can ask her whether she’s been sexually exclusive with him, and Max – who’s also present – tells him to ask the question. But Anatol ultimately decides not to, choosing to trust his wife, and the two kiss and make up as the movie ends.

The Affairs of Anatol suffers from DeMille’s moralizing – there are even citations from the Bible that offer hints of the later sort of moviemaking that would be identified with him – but for the most part it’s a stunning sexual romp through the demi-monde (even though Anatol and Vivian, like their counterparts in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, never actually do the down-‘n’-dirty with alternate partners) whose moral lesson is to avoid the demi-monde because the demi-monde is just too boring and meaningless to bother with. One of the things that struck me about The Affairs of Anatol the first time I saw it is how sophisticated technically as well as morally; this is not the sort of “Cecil B. DeMille picture” that got lambasted by later critics even though millions of moviegoers paid to see them and undoubtedly left the theatre thinking they’d got their money’s worth. In Gloria Swanson’s autobiography she said DeMille offered her choice of any of the four leading female roles, and she chose to play the wife simply because that would mean she’d be in the film throughout. She also said she had major problems dealing with Wallace Reid because he was already addicted to drugs. Reid had become an addict after a film he worked on called The Valley of the Giants (1919), a film about the lumber industry that was later remade as The Big Trees (1952). He was on his way to the location when he was the victim of a train crash, and the doctors treating him prescribed him morphine. He also became an alcoholic. In 1922 Reid checked himself into a sanitarium in hopes of recovering from alcohol and drugs, but he was so far gone that he caught the flu and died in the sanitarium on January 18, 1923: the first, but sadly far from the last, movie star to die a drug-related death. Reid’s widow, Dorothy Davenport, became a public crusader against drug use and made at least two films exposing the dangers of addiction, Human Wreckage (1923) and The Road to Ruin (1934).

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Warner Bros., First National, 1948)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 11) my husband Charles and I watched one of Turner Classic Movies’ double features, co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz (their regular man since the retirement and then passing of their founding host, Robert Osborne) and African-American novelist Colson Whitehead. Whitehead picked two movies that made an oddball pair, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). They both have at least one thing in common: they end with a fortune in either gold or money literally blowing away in the wind. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre began life in 1927 as a novel by the still mysterious “B. Traven,” who was probably German, though his real identity is still open to doubt. Traven’s identity has been traced to Ret Marut (itself a pseudonym), a German stage actor and anarchist editor who fled Germany in 1923 and arrived in Mexico a year later. Beyond that the question of who “B. Traven” was is still very much a matter of debate. John Huston had long wanted to direct and write a film based on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and had originally planned it as his next film after his directorial debut in The Maltese Falcon (1941), but World War II and his stint making battlefield documentaries for the U.S. Army Signal Corps delayed it until 1948. It’s a typical Huston story in that it’s about a group of males on a mad quest for something or other that will supposedly make them rich. Humphrey Bogart, who’d played the lead role of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, took on the role of Fred C. Dobbs, one of two American drifters in Tampico, Mexico in 1925. He meets Curtin (Tim Holt, son of 1920’s action star Jack Holt, who had a truly weird career trajectory: he was in two of the finest films ever made, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons and this, but other than that he spent most of his time making cheap “B” Westerns for RKO), a fellow U.S.-born down-and-outer. The two take a job as oil drillers for another American, Pat McCormick (frequent Bogart nemesis Barton MacLane), and work for him for two weeks, only then they learn that McCormick has a reputation of hiring people and then not paying them. (I joked, “It sounds like Donald Trump’s business model.”) They encounter McCormick out with a woman (there are only two brief scenes featuring women in this entire film!), corner him in a bar, and beat him up for their money.

Between that and the money Dobbs has won in the Mexican lottery (on a ticket sold to him by the very young Robert Blake, playing a Mexican street urchin), the two have enough money to set off on a gold-prospecting expedition in the Sierra Madre Mountains along with an older partner, Howard (Walter Huston, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor), whom they met while staying the night in a Mexican flophouse called El Oso Negro (“The Black Bear”). Howard warns the two younger men (it’s somewhat ironic that Bogart is playing a character much younger than himself: he was 48, and looked it) that discovering gold has a tendency to turn people against each other. They survive an attempted holdup against their train led by a local bandit named “Gold Hat” (Alfonso Bedoya), whom we’ll meet again. There’s the predictable red herring along the way when Dobbs and Curtin discover what they think is gold but is actually iron pyrite, better known as “fool’s gold.” They finally discover the real stuff, set up a mining operation, and extract gold in powdered placer form, though already suspicions are starting to divide them. At Dobbs’s insistence, instead of storing their gold collectively and dividing the proceeds only once they return to civilization and sell it, they each divide their “goods” as they go along. Then they’re encountered by another expatriate American, Tim Cody (a marvelously understated performance by Bruce Bennett, born Herman Brix, who’d made a serial called The New Adventures of Tarzan on the basis of his acclaim as a championship swimmer, then had to work his ass off to overcome that image and convince people that Bruce Bennett could really act), only Cody’s advent on the scene throws their already growing paranoia into overdrive. At one point they coldly and calculatedly decide to kill him, only Cody’s life is saved at least briefly by Gold Hat and his gang of bandidos, who come upon them looking not for gold, but for their guns. There’s a skirmish in which Cody is killed after all, though Curtin finds a letter to him from his wife back home in Texas and decides that as soon as their business with the gold is done he’s going to go to Houston and look her up.

Dobbs’s growing fear that the others are out to get him and kill him for his share of the gold leads him to confront Curtin and threaten to kill him. Ultimately Dobbs meets his end in what I hadn’t realized before is a sequence surprisingly close to the end of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones: a lost man, increasingly paranoid that his riches are going to be taken away from him and he killed, talking to himself in a primitive jungle environment. Ultimately the bandits kill Dobbs and steal the pelt hides he’d collected and intended to sell, but they pour out the gold because they thought it was just sand stuffed in the hides to make them weigh more so Dobbs would get more money from them. In Traven’s book we only learn about this later, but in Huston’s film we actually see the empty gold sacks littering the ground as a major wind blows the last of the treasure away. (Huston was a good enough child of classic Hollywood to have “planted” this in an earlier scene in which Dobbs and Curtin marvel at how unassuming the gold looks in powder form: just like sand.) Eventually Howard settles into a career as a medicine man for the local Natives, courtesy of a young girl he’d cured earlier, while Curtin goes off to Houston to seek out Cody’s widow. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was not only set in Mexico but, at Huston’s insistence, largely shot there. While there Huston sought out B. Traven and was accosted by a ratty-looking man whose business card identified him as “Hal Croves, Translator.” Croves told Huston that he knew more about Traven’s works than Traven himself did, and he became a technical advisor to the film. It didn’t take Huston long to figure out that “Croves” was almost certainly Traven himself, though after the film was made Traven strongly turned against Huston and wrote nasty letters that have been quoted in biographies.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre won Academy Awards for John Huston as both director and writer as well as Walter Huston for his performance as Howard – the only time a father and son have won Oscars for the same movie. (Later Huston would direct his daughter Anjelica to an Academy Award for Best Actress for Prizzi’s Honor, making the Hustons the first three-generation family winners: the Coppolas are the only others.) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre remains one of the most remarkable movies ever made, and I’m flabbergasted that Huston was able to get it green-lighted given that it’s a tough, no-nonsense melodrama about riches and what greed does to people. Jack Warner turned strongly in the other direction for his production slate after 1948; after making The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Jean Negulesco’s Johnny Belinda (which starred Jane Wyman as a deaf-mute), he decided on the basis of the success of Doris Day’s first feature movie, Romance on the High Seas, that he’d shift the Warners production schedule away from edgy melodramas and more towards splashy musicals, all in Technicolor and mostly starring Day.