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!

Humoresque (Warner Bros., 1946)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 21) my husband Charles came home from work at around 10:50 p.m. and caught me in the middle of watching Turner Classic Movies. They had on a cartoon short called The Hep Cat, a surprisingly homoerotic tale of a cat and a dog, both male. The dog assumes girl-cat drag to seduce the cat. Charles asked me what TCM was showing after that, and it was the 1946 film Humoresque, directed by Jean Negulesco from a script by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold based on a 1919 novel by Fannie Hurst called Humoresque: A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It. The stars were Joan Crawford (in her first film after winning her long-awaited Academy Award for Mildred Pierce) and John Garfield, who’d been boosted to movie stardom in another adaptation of a Fannie Hurst story about music, Four Daughters, in 1939. The film opens with world-famous violinist Paul Boray (John Garfield) abruptly canceling his latest concert. A crisis meeting between Boray, his accompanist Sid Jeffers (Oscar Levant, with his usual slashing wit), and his manager Franklin Bauer (Richard Gaines), shows Boray declaring he’s through with music forever, he doesn’t even like it anymore, and he’s going to quit his concert career. Then the film goes into a flashback of Boray’s life, starting in his childhood (in which the young Robert Blake plays Boray as a boy, and Charles gave him major brownie points for looking enough like John Garfield you could easily imagine them as being the same person at different ages). Boray and his parents Rudy (J. Carrol Naish), a grocer in New York’s tenement district (“played” by Warners’ two-decade old set built for The Jazz Singer!) and Esther are at a toy store to buy him something for his birthday. Rudy is trying to get his son a suitably butch present, like a baseball bat or a set of boxing gloves, but Paul has his sights set on an $8 violin the store has on sale. Rudy drags Paul home without getting him the fiddle, but eventually Esther sneaks back to the store with $8 in hand to buy Paul the instrument. At first Paul plays unbearably badly and scratchy, but eventually he practices enough to learn the basic technique and wins a slot at the local music school playing in their student orchestra. At one rehearsal Paul keeps playing when the conductor tells him to stop, and walks out with his violin in its case. We got the message: this is a man whose destiny is a solo career as a concert star, not an anonymous drone in an orchestra.

Under pressure from his family – not only his parents but his brother Phil (Tom D’Andrea) and his sister Florence (Peggy Knudsen) – to start bringing in some money (the time is the early 1930’s, in the middle of the Great Depression) – Paul gets a job, at Sid’s recommendation, at a radio station. Only at his first rehearsal the technicians running the broadcast decide it’s too long and cut a huge section out of the last movement of whatever it is they’re broadcasting, and Paul has another divo hissy-fit and stalks out. Fortunately, Sid has heard of a major 1-percent couple, Victor Wright (Paul Cavanagh) and his trophy wife Helen (Joan Crawford – who doesn’t enter the movie until about half an hour in, which probably disappointed 1946 movie audiences expecting to see the star from the get-go). Helen has been through two previous marriages and latched on to Victor because his money would enable her to live well and he wouldn’t insist on sexual exclusivity. She’s become known as a patron of the arts who latches on to young men with talent, drains them emotionally dry, and cuts them loose as soon as she’s bored with them. (In this she’s an ancestor of the character Joan Fontaine played in the 1956 film Serenade, also a Warner Bros. project, but the movie was bowdlerized from James M. Cain’s 1937 novel, in which the character was a Gay conductor who seduces a star tenor. I’ve often joked that Serenade is the movie in which Joan Fontaine played a Gay man, and I’ve long wished Pedro Almodóvar would remake Serenade come scritto.) Helen takes an instant interest in Paul and agrees to find him a manager and underwrites his concert debut, which takes place in a small half-filled hall. Nonetheless, Paul Boray receives such good reviews (aside from a rather pissy dismissal from a paper called the New York Progressive) that his concert career is launched. Though Paul has a class-peer girlfriend back home, Gina (Joan Chandler), he falls hard for Esther even though she keeps insisting her interest in him is merely professional, not personal. Ultimately he wears her down and they make love on the beach outside one of her multiple homes seven years before the similarly lubricious beach scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. By this time Esther has discovered she’s as much in love with Paul as he is with her, and she even asks Victor for a divorce so the two can marry. But Paul’s mother Esther reads him the riot act about how unsuitable a match between him and Helen would be.

It climaxes when Paul gives a big concert at which the finale is going to be an orchestral arrangement of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, done by Franz Waxman (who was at the top of his form when he composed the music for this film) with Oscar Levant supplying an unneeded piano obbligato but Paul (or rather Isaac Stern, John Garfield’s violin double) is taking over the soprano line beautifully. (Instrumental-only versions of the Liebestod usually annoy me, and I sometimes find myself humming the missing soprano part.) Neither Helen nor Esther come to Paul’s big concert, though Helen decides to stay behind and listen to the radio broadcast of it. Unfortunately, she’s so overcome by the dilemmas in her life and the crisis she’s made for herself that she decides to drown herself in the beach at the same place where she and Paul had had sex for the first time. Paul, Sid, and Bauer find her body, but the shock of her death is what unhinged Paul and led him to start canceling his concerts in the first place. The film ends with Paul walking out of his fancy apartment and heading towards the tenement neighborhood where he grew up, as Sid and Bauer conclude that it’s just a temporary setback and he’ll return to the career for which he was destined. Humoresque is a movie that holds up surprisingly well; obviously producer Jerry Wald was going for the mix of romantic melodrama and film noir that had made Mildred Pierce a box-office success, and though this one is tilted more towards romance than noir, the noir elements are there in the casting of Garfield (who, as he did in Four Daughters, brings brooding Method intensity to what otherwise could have been a pretty nothing role) and in Crawford’s formidable appearance. She’s wearing all black in almost every scene she’s in, and director Jean Negulesco recalled that at first he had a hard time communicating with her and telling her what he wanted on set.

In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse, Negulesco recalled that, at the suggestion of his wife Dusty Anderson, he did an oil portrait of Crawford as Helen Wright (he’d been a successful painter in his native Romania before coming to the U.S. and getting involved with films), gave it to her, and said, “This is what the character should be.” Crawford also had her problems with Garfield, who, according to an imdb.com “Trivia” comment, “tried to obtain an emotional bond with the character Joan Crawford played by looking deeply into her eyes, which very much unnerved Crawford, who told the director, ‘Tell him to stop looking at me!’” The scenes in which Garfield, who actually had no idea of even how to hold a violin, much less play one, were done with a special technique called “the octopus.” It involved having Garfield wear an oversized suit jacket with two extra sleeve holes in it. Two real violinists stood behind Garfield in his scenes and put their arms through the extra holes, one to do the bowing and one to do the fretting in synch to Isaac Stern’s pre-recording. Oscar Levant was apparently so amused at the sheer number of people involved that at one point he joked, “Why don’t the five of us go out and do a concert?” In his The Celluloid Muse interview Negulesco took credit for inventing the technique, but it had actually been created in 1936 by Swedish director Gustav Molander for the first version of the film Intermezzo. He’d come up with it to make it look like Ingrid Bergman could play the violin, and when Bergman came to Hollywood in 1939 and did a remake of Intermezzo as her first American film, she taught it to David O. Selznick’s technicians. It was so convincing that at later Hollywood parties Garfield would be asked to play a number on a violin, and he’d have to beg off with excuses similar to the ones Dooley Wilson, who was a talented singer but couldn’t play piano, had to use to beg off singing and playing his hit song “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca. In later years Negulesco was a bit embarrassed at all the special camera tricks he indulged in in Humoresque, but they add a great deal to the film, especially the montage of proletarian life in New York City that had Charles joking we were suddenly in the land of Dziga Vertov and his 1928 documentary Man with a Movie Camera. Humoresque holds up quite well, at least partly because of the ambiguity of Crawford’s character; it’s about midway through the progression pioneering French film critic André Bazin noted when he said she was looking more masculine in each new film, and whereas Bette Davis would have played a role like this with flaring intensity, Crawford’s impassivity actually works better for it.

Inspector George Gently: "Gently in the Blood" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, aired January 4, 2009)

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

Last night (Thursday, March 19) at 10 p.m. I watched a KPBS telecast of the “Gently in the Blood” episode of Inspector George Gently, a British policier that ran eight seasons from 2008 to 2017 and began, like the first episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime, with the murder of the principal police-officer character’s wife – in this case, by a notorious gangster named Joe Webster. The show took place in the mid-1960’s and worked Britain’s abolition of the death penalty in 1965 into the plotting, though “Gently in the Blood” took place in 1964 and actually ends with the hanging of the murderer before abolition occurred. “Gently in the Blood” begins with a late-night confrontation between Gently, his assistant Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby, who wore his hair in a Beatles haircut and looked enough like John Lennon he’d have been good casting, at least visually, for a biopic in 2008, when this episode was filmed), and a group of young thugs led by Jimmy Cochran (Andrew Lee Potts). The confrontation takes place in a British Navy cemetery in front of a monument honoring the sailors who gave their lives during World War II. Director Ciarán Donnelly gives us lots of yummy shots of Cochran’s crotch, clad in white pants that show an amazingly huge basket, and I wondered if this episode’s casting director, Thyrza Ging, was anticipating Lifetime’s formula of making the hottest-looking male the principal villain. The series was set in Newcastle upon Tyne in Northumberland (the books on which it was based took place in Norfolk), and the beach figures importantly in the plot. The cops fail to make any arrests in the passport scheme but they are able to recover the passports, which turn out to be the genuine British government-issued article, and trace them to an office in Newcastle run by Philip Saint (Joe Sampson). Maggie Alderton (Robyn Anderson) works as a clerk in the passport office and is also the girlfriend of Jimmy Cochran. Her parents (Steven Hillman and Elizabeth Rider) can’t stand him, believing that her infatuation with Jimmy robbed her of her potential success out of high school. Maggie is also a single mother, and the question of who her baby’s father was becomes a major issue in the script by Peter Flannery.

Maggie is found murdered on the beach outside the Shoreline Inn, a rather skuzzy bar and pool hall (the presence of pool tables made me think of the late Wlliam K. Everson’s joke that pool had been established as a major avocation of movie criminals since the first gangster film, D. W. Griffith’s 1912 The Musketeers of Pig Alley) along the coast where Jimmy and his gang members, most of whom are of Arab descent, hang out. (The walls of the Shoreline Inn feature posters for various British rock bands of the period – all of them fictional, at least as far as I could tell – but there’s no stage or any other hint that the club ever presents live music.) Among the candidates for the father of Maggie’s baby are Jimmy Cochran and a 40-something Brit of Arab descent named Thomas Ali (Stewart Scudamore), who was seen visiting Maggie’s flat just hours before she was killed. When the baby was born dark-skinned Jimmy immediately assumed Maggie had been having extra-relational activities and suspected Thomas Ali of being the father. For the first hour of this 90-minute show the action cuts between the police investigating Maggie’s death and Cochran and his fellow gangsters, all of whom are Arab-British, trying to salvage the business in stolen and altered passports after the cops have confiscated their existing stock. There are also at least two scenes in which Thomas Ali goes to the club and harangues the younger Arab-Brits there about violating the tenets of Islam, especially the ones against gambling and drinking alcohol. At one point Inspector Gently even poses as Philip Saint and tries to extract information from the thug kids. Jimmy is relentlessly hostile towards the Arabs he’s supposedly in league with, and towards one Arab in particular, Hamed (Tariq Jordan), whom he also suspects of being Maggie’s paramour and the father of her mixed-race baby. He’s big on drawing a switchblade and holding it to the neck of the person who’s bothering him the most at the moment, though in one scene he and Hamed confront each other and both have switchblades drawn and are holding them at each other’s necks.

Then in the last half-hour Peter Flannery starts throwing reversals at us with a speed that might have made even Tony Gilroy blush [multiple spoiler alerts!]. First of all, Thomas Ali turns out to be the father of Jimmy Cochran; his aunt (Catherine Terris) and her husband adopted him, told him his father had died in the war (which was why he hung out a lot at the Navy cemetery), couldn’t discipline him, and threw him out, but not before creating a false identity for him that conceals that his real name was Thomas Jamiel Ali. They got “Jimmy” as a first name as an obvious “Anglification” of “Jamiel.” Jimmy was also the father of Maggie’s child – she’d never had sex, at least not willingly, with anyone else – and her murderer was Hamed, who’d had a long-time crush on her. On the fatal night Hamed tricked her into getting in his car, drove her to the beach, raped her and killed her, leaving the baby (whom she was carrying in a basket and she took Hamed’s ride mainly to get them out of a driving rainstorm) out in the elements to die. During the later stages of Maggie’s life Jimmy had talked about settling down, finding a legitimate job, marrying Maggie and helping raise their son despite his obviously Arab appearance. As for Thomas Ali’s appearance in Maggie’s flat, he was there merely to acquire a fake passport so he could flee Britain and return to his ancestral homeland, Yemen (called “The Yemen” for some reason in Flannery’s script). It also turns out that Philip Saint was Transgender and, rather than having an infatuation with Maggie as most of the other characters assumed, actually wanted to be Maggie. At the end Jimmy Cochran makes a moral reversal that for sheer unbelievability rivals the end of Puccini’s Turandot: despite Maggie no longer being alive to help him, he determines to get a job, lose his duck’s-ass hairdo and get short-back-and-sides, and raise his son as a single father.

What’s most remarkable about Inspector George Gently is that there’s none of the light, almost comic breeziness of most British TV shows about cops. It – at least judging from this episode – is relentlessly serious, grim, almost noir both thematically and visually. It also hints at a critique of British racism; early on in the show Gently upbraids his assistant and partner Bacchus for having made a racial slur towards a suspect, and by the end we’ve been given a taste of the ongoing prejudice all too many white Britishers feel towards the Arab-descended people in their midst, and how that makes the Arab-British feel as essentially second-class citizens in their own country. Given Donald Trump’s ascendancy in American politics and the anti-immigrant, especially anti-immigrants-of-color, policies of his government, this part of “Gently in the Blood” is all too timely today.

Jurassic World: Rebirth (Universal, Amblin Entertainment, Dentsu, India Take One Productions, Latina Pictures, SKY Studios, Taiwan Film Company, Kennedy/Marshall Company, 2025)

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

Last Saturday, March 14, my husband Charles, his mother Edi, and I watched a streaming telecast of the 2025 movie Jurassic World: Rebirth. It was a well-made film directed by Gareth Edwards, who made his debut in 2010 with an ultra-low-budget horror film called Monsters and has since been called upon to helm such major-budget franchise films as Godzilla (the 2014 reboot that launched the so-called “Monsters cycle”) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), which Charles and I watched together on DVD and thought was essentially The Guns of Navarone: the bad guys have a super-weapon and the good guys send in a commando team to blow it up. Jurassic World: Rebirth was written by David Koepp, who wrote the first two films in the Jurassic Park cycle (the two, Jurassic Park and The Lost World, which Steven Spielberg personally directed). It was a good movie but also a surprisingly workmanlike one. Part of the problem was a low-voltage cast, with only one major “name” (Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, a secret agent and hired killer for an unnamed country) and one semi-“name” (Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid, a Black fishing boat captain who’s inveigled to sail the white people into the middle of dino-country; Ali is best known for having played pianist Don Shirley in Green Book, a nice, liberal film that won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Picture over Ryan Coogler’s radical masterpiece Black Panther, but here Ali is playing a typical insulting stereotype instead of the urbane, cultured Don Shirley). There’s an opening prologue set in Île Saint-Hubert in the Atlantic Ocean in 2008, where executives at InGen, the genetic engineering company that revivified the dinosaurs of old in the original Jurassic Park and its sequelae, decide once again that their dino-attractions have got stale and they need to create new monsters to display to the general population. Alas, a fugitive candy bar wrapper blows into the middle of the station’s security system and disables the locks that are supposed to keep the new dinosaur, Distortus Rex, safely confined. With the dinosaur loose on the island, the entire complement of humanity evacuates and leaves the island abandoned.

Flash-forward 17 years, and there’s been an unexpected development in the sudden co-existence between humans and dinosaurs posited in the previous two films, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Jurassic World: Dominion (2022). Whereas Jeff Goldblum’s character in Fallen Kingdom (the same one he played in the original 1993 Jurassic Park, as he had naturally aged) intoned, “Humans and dinosaurs are now gonna be forced to coexist. These creatures were here before us. And if we’re not careful, they’re gonna be here after. We’re gonna have to adjust to new threats that we can’t imagine. We’ve entered a new era. Welcome to Jurassic World,” David Koepp decided to avoid the bothersome necessity of having humans and dinosaurs co-exist for an extended period of time. Instead, after a spectacular sequence of a Brontosaurus stamping around the streets of New York City before it expires from natural causes, we’re told that because the climate of Earth c. 2025 is so radically different from what it was when the original dinosaurs actually lived, they’ve retreated to a band of climate on either side of the Equator that approximates what the whole Earth was like when dinosaurs ruled it. For obvious security reasons the governments of Earth have come together and declared that band off limits to humans, though that doesn’t stop Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), executive for the ParkerGenix drug company and the villain of the piece, from organizing an expedition to Île Saint-Hubert to collect genetic samples from three dinosaurs, the aquatic Mosasaurus, the land-based Titanosaurus, and the flying Quetzalcoatlus. The purpose is to figure out what made dino-hearts beat so long and hard in hopes that could be used to develop a drug to treat heart disease. Krebs recruits Zora Bennett and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, in a role obviously patterned on Richard Dreyfuss’s cute-scientist character in 1975’s Jaws) to his cause with the promise of eight-figure salaries if they join. Bennett in turn hires trawler captain Duncan Kincaid to take them on his boat, and Kincaid brings along a crew of maritime pilot LeClerc (Bechir Sylvain), mercenary Nina (Philippine Velge), and security expert Bobby Atwater (Ed Skrein).

Along the way they rescue a family who’ve become shipwrecked: Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo); his two daughters, teenager Teresa (Luna Blaise) and pre-pubescent Isabella (Audrina Miranda); and Teresa’s slacker boyfriend Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono). Xavier is obviously the comic-relief character, though unlike Frank McHugh and the others who played those sorts of roles in the 1930’s, Iacono is quite cute (and we get lots of yummy shots of him topless!). The intrepid explorers hope to collect the samples by shooting miniature harpoons into the dinosaurs that will draw their blood. Then, when their reservoirs are full, the tubes containing the samples will be fired out of the animals and will fly to safety via parachute-equipped vials. Along the way Dr. Loomis starts having ethical qualms about what they’re doing and whether, instead of turning the samples over to Krebs, maybe they should do the genetic sequencing themselves and release the files to the whole world as a public-domain item rather than letting ParkerGen have a monopoly on the world’s only effective treatment for heart disease. Once they get to the island, Kincaid’s boat runs aground on the shore, cutting off their principal route of escape. The team manages to collect all the samples, though they decide to take the one from the flying Quetzalcoatlus by drawing it from an egg rather than having to deal with an airborne dinosaur with a 35-foot wingspan and a body the size of a school bus. This requires an elaborate rappelling operation during which Dora, Henry, and LeClerc descend on ropes to the dinosaur’s egg, and though LeClerc gets eaten by one of the Quetzalcoatli, the other two return to safety and just barely retrieve the all-important sample. Zora announces that a helicopter is coming to extract them once the job is finished, but its crew has orders to do only a two-minute fly-by and to leave without landing if there’s no human response in that time. The crew finds the still-stocked grocery store the original 2008 inhabitants abandoned (Charles, who works at a grocery for a living, was startled that we were supposed to believe the food was still good after 17 years in a tropical environment without electrical power) and realize that running the lights is attracting the dinosaurs.

Various genetically engineered creatures menace them, including T. Rexes, a Mutadon (a hybrid aquatic/land-based creature), and our old friend Domitus Rex from the prologue, since David Koepp is a good enough disciple of Anton Chekhov that he uses the Domitus Rex as Chekhov’s pistol and has it dispatch the villain Martin Krebs at the end. The others flee in an outboard boat the original researchers had situated at the end of a long tunnel after somehow being able to use a life raft that the T. Rex toyed with for quite a long time but didn’t puncture. With Krebs dead, the remaining crew members decide to release the dino-DNA formula to the world even though this means they will end up broke. Jurassic World: Rebirth is comparable to the nearly forgotten third film in the Jurassic Park sequence, 2001’s Jurassic Park III, directed by Joe Johnston from a script by Paul Buchman, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. Like Jurassic Park III, Jurassic World: Rebirth is a coolly efficient thrill machine that suffers from the lack of any interesting human characters (though Jurassic Park III at least brought back Sam Neill’s character from the original Jurassic Park). It’s also set mostly on an island and therefore, after the first 2025 sequence of the dinosaur expiring on New York City streets, doesn’t give us the frisson of showing the beasts interact with humans in an urban environment, something that was de rigueur among the best dino-movies of the past (The Lost World, 1925; King Kong, 1933; and Gojira, the original 1954 Japanese version of Godzilla and a much superior version to the one palmed off on U.S. audiences two years later). Gareth Edwards is a potentially interesting director but, like Rian Johnson and Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son), he got a career boost from a low-budget independent first feature and drew big-budget franchise tent-pole assignments long before he was ready for them. As he did with the 2014 Godzilla and 2016’s Rogue One, Edwards plays by the rules and turns in a movie that delivers the entertainment goods, and has a vestigial anti-corporate social commentary that sits oddly in the current Zeitgeist and seems more like a leftover tic than a serious plot point, but despite one Academy Award nomination (for Best Visual Effects, which it lost to Avatar: Fire and Ash, third film in James Cameron’s stunning cycle), Jurassic World: Rebirth is nothing special.

Term of Trial (Romulus, Warner Bros., 1962)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 8) my husband Charles and I watched a Warner Archive DVD (essentially a home-burned DVD-ROM, though from a major studio, with chapter stops only every 10 minutes instead of being cued to the contents of the film) of a 1962 British production called Term of Trial. Term of Trial, written and directed by Peter Glenville from a novel by James Barlow, is a British production by Romulus, distributed by Warner Bros., about Graham Weir (Laurence Olivier), a schoolteacher who is teaching in a proletarian public school in Easton (a suburb of Bristol in central England) where the students are mostly incredibly rowdy and more interested in acting up and having (or seeking) sex with each other than in learning. Graham is unhappily married to Anna (Simone Signoret), a Frenchwoman whom he met shortly after World War II and brought back to Britain. We get the hint that Anna had some sort of career as an entertainer before the war and before she got hooked up with Graham, but she’s too old to resume it now. Graham is upset that his past – he was a conscientious objector during the war and served prison time for it – has kept him from the more lucrative teaching jobs at private schools. So he takes his frustrations out by drinking a lot, mostly in pubs on his way home from work, though (contrary to the Wikipedia posts on both Barlow’s novel and Glenville’s film) he doesn’t really qualify as an alcoholic. He runs afoul of two students in particular: Mitchell (Terence Stamp, who made this film just before actor-director Peter Ustinov cast him in the title role of his 1962 film of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, his star-making role), a thug-like lout who bullies his classmates and sneaks a camera through the window of the girls’ restroom so he can take dirty pictures of them without their knowledge; and Shirley Taylor (Sarah Miles).

Shirley comes from a working-class home whose parents (Norman Bird and Barbara Ferris) are hostile to her career ambitions, such as they are, because her big hope is to get into secretarial school and learn not only to type and take dictation but also speak in a higher-end form of English. To achieve all this, she sets her cap for Graham and seeks his help not only in legitimate ways, like placing her in a night-school class and setting up private tutoring sessions for her, but also in not-so-legitimate ones. The official synopsis on imdb.com reads, “A British high-school girl becomes infatuated with her English teacher, but after he rejects her amorous advances, she goes to the police and accuses him of indecent assault,” but oddly that plot line takes place only during the last third or so of this two-hour movie. The alleged assault took place while Graham, two other teachers, and 15 students were on a field trip to Europe, and Graham was leading five students on a tour of Paris. Shirley either feels faint while the tour group is visiting the Louvre (naturally we get a nice close-up of the Mona Lisa in situ and without the elaborate security precautions that surround it today) or pretends to so Graham will take her on their own to see the Eiffel Tower and other historic Parisian locations. (The Eiffel Tower’s elevator is built in and runs from a car shaped like a parallelogram that ascends and descends at an angle based on the structure’s incline. Inevitably it reminded me of the Angels’ Flight in Los Angeles, another favorite location of moviemakers.) Before then we see a lot of rather dreary scenes between Graham and Anna, and between Graham and headmaster Ferguson (Frank Pettingell, who played Sir John Falstaff in the 1960 BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings, a presentation of William Shakespeare’s history plays from Richard II to Richard III that told the story of the Wars of the Roses; alas, Pettingell was terrible in the role, insufferably hammy and overacted, though as I’ve said before, one of the great cultural tragedies of the 20th century was that no one ever thought to cast W. C. Fields as Falstaff: he would have been ideal!).

We also see a scene in which Mitchell and three of his equally rowdy buddies corner Shirley in a vacant lot and look like they’re about to gang-rape her, though they decide not to and figure they’ve fought back enough just by scaring her with that prospect rather than actually going through with it. Shirley had “earned” that fate by turning down a date with Mitchell and telling him he disgusted her, and threatening her with sexual assault was his way of getting back at her. Ultimately Shirley and Graham end up together in Graham’s hotel room in London (a mix-up in their train reservations have stranded them there for a night before they can return to Easton), after Shirley has gone there wearing just a slip under her overcoat. Presumably she’s there to lose her virginity to the teacher she for some reason has formed a crush on, and he gives her a glass of water which she, frightened by a thunderclap, immediately drops and lets shatter. Writer/director Glenville keeps the staging of this scene ambiguous, letting us decide for ourselves whether Graham is improperly interested in deflowering Shirley or just wants to turn down her advance in a polite way. They get as far as kissing each other before he sends her on her way, gives her a pat on the behind, and sends her back to her room in the hotel. When all the principals return to Easton, Graham finds himself being visited by a police official, Detective Sergeant Kiernan (Dudley Foster), who informs him that Shirley (or, rather, her mother) has filed charges against him for indecent conduct. Graham is scared shitless of not only going to prison (again) but, even if he isn’t incarcerated, losing his ability to work as a teacher. He’s also afraid that his wife Anna (ya remember Anna?) will divorce him. After a scene in which Graham is arrested and taken to a police station, where he’s grilled in a rather dowdy-looking interrogation room, the trial takes place before three judges instead of a jury.

The main witnesses against Graham are Shirley and her mother, and though Graham’s attorney does a seemingly good job of cross-examining Shirley, ultimately the judges find against Graham and sentence him to probation. Then [spoiler alert!] Shirley speaks up in court and declares that everything she said on the witness stand was a lie and Graham was totally gentlemanly towards her; she said it was only under the influence of her mom that she lied on the stand. Graham walks through the streets of Easton and sees a great variety of sexually explicit literature and toys for sale openly in shop windows – a great scene that shows how sheltered Graham has been from the sexual dark side ¬– and also buys a gun which he apparently intends to use to kill himself if his career is ruined. Graham meets with Ferguson and learns that the scandal has cost him the promotion to assistant headmaster he was hoping for. Ferguson tells Graham point-blank that, though he’s not firing Graham, he thinks it would be better for the school and the community if Graham resigned and sought a teaching job somewhere else. Graham refuses and says he’ll serve out at least the rest of the current school term in Easton. Then Graham returns home to Anna (once again, ya remember Anna?) and sees the gun he bought on their table. For a moment I thought Glenville and Barlow had had Anna kill herself over her husband’s shame the way Simone Signoret’s character had done in a much finer and better-known film, Room at the Top (1959), but no-o-o-o-o. Instead she’s still alive but has packed her bags and left, until in the film’s most twisted scene [double spoiler alert!] Graham realizes that the only way he can hold on to his wife is by telling her that Shirley’s testimony was right the first time and wrong the second: he really did attempt to seduce Shirley in that hotel room. For some reason, this leads Anne to decide that her husband is butch enough after all for her to remain with him and keep trying to make the marriage work.

Though I didn’t watch it that way, I first heard of Term of Trial when Eddie Muller showed it on his “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies even though it’s not really a film noir. Instead, more than anything, it’s an example of the so-called “kitchen-sink dramas” popular in British cinema in those days about the nastier, grungier, more proletarian aspects of British life. Laurence Olivier was aware enough of the changing market he decided that, rather than trying to beat the kitchen-sink boys at their own game, he’d join them. He commissioned one of Britain’s “angry young man” playwrights, John Osborne, to write a play for him called The Entertainer, in which he’d star as an over-the-hill entertainer unable to come to grips with the way both the entertainment world and real life had passed him by. Olivier also ended up marrying Joan Plowright, who played his daughter in The Entertainer. Term of Trial was yet another attempt by the now middle-aged Olivier to keep up with the times, and he’s quite good in a nondescript milquetoast way as a man embittered by his own disappointments in life. Charles said the story reminded him of The Police’s song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” also about a nubile young female student cruising a married male teacher twice her age and the teacher’s guilt feelings about their relationship, specifically his attraction to her versus his awareness of both the legal and moral jeopardy of following through on it.

Mutiny on the Bounty (Arcola Pictures, MGM, 1962)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 7) at 7:30 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty on Turner Classic Movies. It was a film that was savaged at the time, largely due to the public disagreements between director Lewis Milestone and star Marlon Brando, which among other things alienated the other actors and caused the costs to run well over the film’s budget. The 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty would have been the 1960’s version of Heaven’s Gate if not for the even more spectacular crash and burn that year of the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton-Joseph L. Mankiewicz Cleopatra. Like Heaven’s Gate, the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty was a film I’d read trash talk about literally for decades before I finally saw it – and it was actually pretty good. The film began as a medium-budget project, a remake of a successful film from 1935 directed by Frank Lloyd (a specialist in dramas set all or largely at sea) with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as an almost demonic Captain William Bligh. The original plan for the remake was announced in 1958, with John Sturges directing, Burt Lancaster as Christian, and Spencer Tracy as Bligh. When MGM, the producing studio, signed Brando instead, Sturges dropped out. MGM hired British director Carol Reed and commissioned an exact replica of the Bounty based on the surviving plans for the original ship. Their Bounty was 106 feet long, 15 feet longer than the original, because it needed to accommodate the cameras, sound recorders, and film processing equipment, since in a vain attempt to hold down costs producer Aaron Rosenberg had decided not only to shoot on location in Tahiti but develop the film there instead of risking sending it back to Hollywood for processing. (The 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty had been shot entirely in the U.S., with Catalina Island, Hollywood’s all-purpose substitute for the South Seas, “playing” Tahiti.) Reed was on the film for months, shooting what he could without a Bounty because construction of the replica ship had run over budget and schedule, until he was either fired or quit.

Russian-born American director Lewis Milestone was hired to replace him, and as he told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in an interview for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, “When I came on to Mutiny on the Bounty after Carol Reed left, I felt it would be an easy assignment because they’d been on it for months and there surely couldn’t be much more to do. To my dismay, I discovered that all they’d done was a seven-minute scene just before they land in Papeete, in which Trevor Howard issues instructions about obtaining island breadfruit. Marlon Brando swears he had nothing to do with Carol Reed’s departure; that was a matter between Reed and the producer. However, Carol resigned with full pay, which is not a bad way to go.” According to some reports, Brando was happy to work with Milestone because he’d long been a fan of Milestone’s anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and Milestone told Higham and Greenberg that Brando was actually easy to work with for the first two weeks or so that he was on the project. During that time Milestone enjoyed working with the British actors in the cast, including Trevor Howard and Richard Harris (Milestone and Harris became and remained friends). “Then the trouble started,” Milestone said. “I would say that what basically went wrong with Mutiny on the Bounty was that the producer made a number of promises to Marlon Brando which he subsequently couldn’t keep. It was an impossible situation because, right or wrong, the man simply took charge of everything. You had the option of sitting and watching him or turning your back on him. Neither the producers nor I could do anything about it.” Maybe Brando’s take-charge attitude came from the fact that he came to Bounty right after finishing One-Eyed Jacks, a quirky Western (and another monumentally underrated film) in which he directed himself for the first and only time, and it’s possible that having just served as his own director he had a hard time getting used to working under someone else’s guidance. (Brando had originally started One-Eyed Jacks with Stanley Kubrick as his director, but early on he’d fired Kubrick and taken over the direction himself – which freed Kubrick to take over another troubled production for a producer/star, Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus.) One Brando biographer, Gary Carey, said that Milestone was particularly offended when Brando started wearing cotton earplugs around the set. (A later Brando director, Gillo Pontecorvo, said Brando did that on his film with him, Burn!, but Pontecorvo accepted it because the film was an international production and he could see why Brando might want to cut himself off from the cacophony of various actors from various countries speaking different languages.)

Brando, in turn, blamed the cost overruns on Mutiny on the Bounty on the fact that they didn’t have a completed script when they went into production. Screenwriter Charles Lederer was on the location writing it as they went along, and according to Milestone, Brando and Lederer would have daily meetings in which they would hash out the script without inviting Milestone to participate. By the time those meetings ended, Milestone said, “It was about 2:30 and we hadn’t shot a scene. You had the option of shooting it, but since Marlon Brando was going to supervise it anyway, I waited until someone yelled, ‘Camera!,” and I went off to sit down somewhere and read the paper.” I first saw the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty with my ideas about it largely formed by Milestone’s The Celluloid Muse interview and the widespread criticism of Brando’s performance as being too nellie, almost Gay. I was quite surprised by how effective he was as Christian, and this time around I was also impressed by at least one thing about Lederer’s script. He depicted the clash between Bligh and Christian in class-conscious terms; he wrote Bligh as a self-made man from humble origins who had worked himself up to a command position in the British navy, while Christian was an aristocratic fop who was imposed on Bligh as his second-in-command at the last minute because the previous officer suddenly caught sick on the eve of the voyage. While this is apparently historically inaccurate – in real life both Bligh and Christian came from relatively comfortable but not spectacularly wealthy middle-class families – it creates a powerful motivator for their on-screen conflicts. The conflict is made explicit in a late scene in which Bligh is court-martialed and acquitted by a judge (the great character actor Henry Daniell in an oddly uncredited appearance; I didn’t recognize him immediately but I knew I’d heard that voice somewhere before) who announces that the affair of the Bounty proved the rectitude of the British government’s usual policy of picking its officers from the aristocracy. (That was actually a long-standing problem for Britain; they hired upper-class people to run their military whether they were actually any good at it or not. Occasionally they lucked out and got someone like the Duke of Wellington, who was not only an aristocrat but also a military genius, but most of the time the British fought their wars under unimpressive commanders and it makes one wonder how they were able to conquer as much of the world as they did.)

I found myself wondering if the writers of the 1995 film Crimson Tide, Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, copied this gimmick from the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, since Crimson Tide is also about a mutiny caused by a clash between an older captain (Gene Hackman) and a second-in-command (Denzel Washington) forced upon him when his previous assistant gets sick on the eve of a voyage, and in Crimson Tide the antagonism is not only class-based but race-based as well. And regarding Brando’s reading of Fletcher Christian, he’s certainly nowhere near as butch as Clark Gable (or Errol Flynn, who’d played Christian in a little-known 1933 Australian film called In the Wake of the “Bounty,” which dramatized the mutiny as an historical prologue to a documentary on the survivors of Pitcairn Island; MGM bought the American rights so it wouldn’t be released in competition with the Gable film and sliced off the documentary portions for two “Passing Parade” shorts, Primitive Pitcairn and Pitcairn Island Today), but his portrayal has its own dignity and inner strength. Brando’s voice as Christian is surprisingly strong, with excellent diction, It’s basically the same voice he’d used as Mark Antony in MGM’s film of Julius Caesar nine years earlier, which had surprised a lot of people at the time. When Brando had been announced for Antony, various comedians and impressionists had had a field day doing the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in the voice of Stanley Kowalski, which is not at all how Brando sounded in the actual film. It’s also a fascinating film to watch today, given how Donald Trump is bullying the world, because Bligh’s whole leadership philosophy is very Trumpian: in a speech beautifully delivered by Trevor Howard, who portrays Bligh not as the figure of almost supernatural evil Charles Laughton did but as a man in desperately over his head and forced to maintain discipline in the only way he knows, he explains that the only way to keep order on his ship is through instilling enough fear in the crew members that they obey his orders because of the hugely drastic consequences if they don’t.

It’s also fascinating in that the breadfruit themselves, which the British government was importing as slave food for the captive African populations in Jamaica, become a quite effective MacGuffin. First we’re told by the ship’s botanist, William Brown (Richard Haydn), that the breadfruit have a dormancy period that starts in October and lasts for about five months thereafter. During that time, any attempt to cut or transplant the breadfruit will kill them. In order to make his tight biologically imposed time line, Bligh first orders the crew to take the dangerous westward route to Tahiti via Cape Horn in South America. Then, when the storms on that route make it too dangerous for the voyage to continue, Bligh reverses course (in both senses) and sails east around the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa, thereby missing the October deadline and leading to the crew’s five-month stay in Tahiti, when the bounds of discipline break down and the crew members have a jolly old time screwing the available and willing Tahitian women. There are some nice bits of dialogue about the mutual incomprehension between the white and Tahitian characters about their sexual mores; in one scene Bligh orders Christian to stop making love to the Tahitian princess Maimiti (Tarita), only to find out that by doing so he’s insulted her father, Chief Hitihiti (Mathairii Tama). As a result the king forbids the Bounty crew to take any breadfruit until Christian makes up for the “insult” by making love to Maimiti after all – which Christian is all too willing to do. (The ancient Polynesians came as close as any human culture ever has to a totally sexually free environment, but they had an enormous advantage that’s impossible to duplicate now: no sexually transmitted diseases. Those microbes didn’t exist in their environment until whites brought them in, and when I first read that I thought, “That’s white people for you. We ruin everything.”) The breadfruit also precipitate the mutiny; when the plants start dying and Brown explains to Bligh that that’s due to the lack of water, Bligh immediately orders the water caskets closed and says that any sailor who wants a drink of water will have to climb the top mast to get the ladle for it. One desperately ill sailor tries this and falls to his death on the Bounty’s deck, and another drinks seawater out of thirst and desperation. It is Christian’s insistence on giving the man the fresh water the ship’s doctor says he needs, along with Bligh’s order that the dead man’s mate be keelhauled (an already illegal punishment that involved tying a man to a rope, throwing him overboard, and letting the ship tow him; it’s a punishment that almost no one survived, and in the film he gets eaten by a shark ex machina) that leads Christian to slap Bligh and start the mutiny.

The 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty certainly has its problems, including a 178-minute running time that makes the story seem padded (by contrast, the 1935 version ran 132 minutes, an unusually long film for the time but one which would have left 1962 audiences feeling short-changed); an ultra-slow pace that probably indicates the director’s lack of interest in the project as he went through hell making it; and a wildly fictionalized ending. In the movie Fletcher Christian orders the mutinous crew to set sail from Pitcairn Island (where they’ve settled because it was misidentified on British naval charts and therefore the British Navy couldn’t find them there) to British jurisdiction to turn themselves in and bring Bligh to justice for his actions. The other crew members, unwilling to risk being executed for the mutiny, refuse and burn the Bounty to make it impossible for Christian to return. In reality, Christian was killed by the Tahitian men he’d brought along on the Bounty after the mutiny who resented the way the British were trying to turn them into virtual slaves. In the film, Christian dies in an heroic attempt to rescue the ship’s sextant, and gets a death scene of such extended histrionics – directed, according to imdb.com, by George Seaton rather than Milestone – even an opera composer like Verdi or Puccini would have probably thought it was too long. Nonetheless, despite its longueurs and the Tahitian scenes, which seem racially insensitive today and probably did for at least some viewers in 1962 as well, the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty holds up surprisingly well and contains one of Marlon Brando’s better performances (and I say that as a decided non-fan of Brando generally; frankly I think he was at his worst in his most butch performances, like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and when he got his big comeback role in The Godfather I loved the film overall but didn’t care for his schticky overacting). And one irony of this film is that Brando fell in love with Tarita for real, living with her and buying an entire island (Tetiaroa, near Tahiti) to be with her when he wasn’t working; ironically, Brando’s second wife, the Mexican actress Movita Castaneda, had played the equivalent role to Tarita’s in the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty.