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.

The Killing (Harris-Kubrick Pictures, United Artists, 1956)

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

After The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on Saturday, July 11 Turner Classic Movies showed Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), only his third film and his first for an at least semi-major studio (United Artists). TCM co-host Colson Whitehead joked that one thing the films had in common was they were both about “sweaty white guys.” Kubrick based his film on a thriller novel by Lionel White called The Clean Break, about a meticulously planned robbery of a racetrack (early on we get an opening shot of the nameplate of Bay Meadows, the San Francisco Bay Area track where the racetrack scenes were filmed, but for most of the movie the track bears the fictional name “Landsdowne.”) Kubrick took credit for the script himself, though he hired another writer, noir specialist Jim Thompson, for dialogue. (Later Thompson would work on Kubrick’s next film, the World War I-set anti-war movie Paths of Glory.) The original release posters said, “In all its fury and violence … like no other picture since Scarface and Little Caesar!” Frankly, The Killing owes a lot to John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle – considerably more than Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, which was frequently compared to it. They’re both movies about a single, elaborately planned crime involving many different people, and they both star Sterling Hayden as the lead criminal. In The Killing the principal crooks are recently released convict Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden); track cashier George Peatty (Elisha Cook, Jr.); track bartender Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer); corrupt policeman Randy Kennan (Ted De Corsia); and Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen), who’s bankrolling the whole scheme in exchange for his share of the proceeds. In addition Clay’s plan involves hiring two other people who won’t be cut in for a share but will be hired for specific tasks relating to the crime. Sharpshooter Nikki Arcane (Timothy Carey) has been told to shoot one of the horses in the middle of the big seventh race, while Maurice Oboukhoff (Kola Kwariani), who’s been hired from a chess and checkers club he runs, has been told to start a fight in the track’s bar that will distract its on-duty police while the robbery takes place.

I hadn’t realized until last night how much Kubrick’s direction of Hayden in The Killing anticipates how he handled Hayden in their later (and much better known) film together, Dr. Strangelove (1964), particularly in the intense need-to-know secrecy with which he surrounds the entire operation. The essence of The Killing is that all the conspirators have mixed motives for participating: Kennan wants to get out from under the loan shark (Jay Adler) who has him by the proverbial balls. Johnny Clay is hoping that the proceeds from the caper will enable him and his partner Fay (Coleen Gray) to live the extravagant lifestyle they’ve always wanted. George Peatty is hoping the money from the robbery will enable him to buy the affections of his faithless wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), who unbeknownst to him is having an extra-relational affair with Val Cannon (Vince Edwards). In fact, Sherry stumbles onto the plot by finding a racetrack ticket with an address on it where the crooks are meeting, and she and Val hatch a plot of their own to hijack the proceeds from the racetrack robbery and use them to run off together. Oddly the film’s most moving scene has almost nothing to do with the main intrigue: it takes place at the racetrack, where Nikki shows up to park his sports car so he can shoot the horse at the exact moment. Only the parking lot he needs to shoot from is not yet open, and he’s informed of that by a Black attendant (James Edwards). The attendant befriends Nikki and thinks at last he’s found a white man who regards him as an equal, only in order to get rid of the man before he screws up the carefully scheduled plot, he pretends to be a racist and calls him the “‘N’-word.”

Eventually the heist happens, but when it comes time to divide up the money Sherry Peatty calls out to “Val.” Her husband hears her call another man’s name and shoots her, while Val shows up and mortally wounds him as well. With the original plot in ruins, as the rather annoying third-person voice-over narrator explains, the fallback plan is that whoever has the money at the end is supposed to hold on to it and notify the others when it’s safe to distribute the proceeds. Johnny Clay has the money, and ironically he drives by the marquee of a burlesque theatre advertising comedian Lenny Bruce (well before Bruce rose out of the confines of burlesque and became a highly acclaimed nightclub comedian and social satirist, only to die of a heroin overdose at age 40 in 1966). He picks up a used suitcase at a pawnshop – the suitcase bears the logo of Las Vegas’s Flamingo Hotel, the pioneering casino notoriously backed by organized crime – stuffs the money into it, and takes a taxi to the airport with the intent of boarding a flight to Boston and taking the money there. Only Johnny and Fay are told that the suitcase is too big to fit inside the passenger compartment, and just as they agree to allow it to go into the baggage claim process, an elderly woman (Cecil Elliott) loses control of her obnoxious dog. The driver of the baggage cart slams on his brakes to avoid running over the dog, and the suitcase with the money falls off the cart. The money spills out all over the place, blown by the draft of the propellers, and Johnny and Fay resignedly accept their fate and are arrested by a pair of plainclothes officers (Charles Cane and Robert B. Williams). The Killing is a quite accomplished film, though to my mind Kubrick’s second film, Killer’s Kiss (also a film noir) is even more dreamlike and hallucinatory. It would attract the attention of mega-star Kirk Douglas to Kubrick and allow him to make Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960), though I still think Kubrick’s best films are the near-future trilogy he’d make after Lolita (1962): Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Night and the City (20th Century-Fox, 1950)

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

Last night (Friday, July 10) my husband Charles and I watched an interesting if rather messy film noir on Turner Classic Movies as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” expansion from his usual Saturday night redoubt to Fridays as well. It was a 1950 film called Night and the City, directed by Jules Dassin from a script by Jo Eisinger based on a 1938 crime novel by British writer Gerald Kersh. According to Muller’s introduction, Kersh’s novel, also called Night and the City, was a loosely constructed set of anecdotes about criminal life in London built around the character of Harry Fabian (played by Richard Widmark in the movie), described on the novel’s Wikipedia page as “a morally reprehensible pimp determined to become the top wrestling promoter in London.” The film rights were bought by 20th Century-Fox with the intent of relocating the story from London to New York, but plans changed after World War II. During the 1930’s Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi’s finance minister and the only member of Hitler’s inner circle who was actually acquitted at Nuremberg, had pioneered the concept of “frozen funds.” Essentially he told companies that had earned money in Germany that they couldn’t take those funds out of the country; they had to spend them in Germany to benefit the German economy. (Sir Thomas Beecham made his 1938 recording of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in Berlin because his bosses at EMI needed a project they could do there to take advantage of the frozen funds.) After the war the Allied countries paid Schacht the compliment of imitating him and slapping controls on their currencies, with the result that Hollywood studios had to make films in Britain and continental Europe to take advantage of their accumulated earnings. So Zanuck and line producer Samuel G. Engel simply moved Night and the City back to London and filmed it on location there.

Night and the City is a peculiar movie because at one level it’s an old-style gangster movie along the lines of Little Caesar or Public Enemy dealing with the rise and fall of a particularly nasty criminal. I’ve long suspected that 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck signed Richard Widmark in the late 1940’s because he saw him as another James Cagney (whom Zanuck had signed to Warner Bros. when he was head of production there), capable of playing both villains and, if not outright heroes, at least sympathetic characters. Zanuck’s first assignment for Widmark was to play the sadistic contract killer Tommy Udo in the 1947 film noir Kiss of Death, in which he pushed a wheelchair-bound grandmother (Mildred Dunnock) down a flight of stairs to kill her. That haunted him for the rest of his life; he once said that little old ladies kept coming up to him and hitting him with their umbrellas to get back at him. Widmark reluctantly accepted the role of Harry Fabian even though he wanted to play more heroic parts – which he did in his next movie, as a Public Health Service doctor tracing a potential plague epidemic through the New Orleans criminal underworld in Panic in the Streets. Fox also sent another American star to be in Night and the City: Gene Tierney, playing Mary Bristol (yet another instance of Hollywood during the classic era telling us we’re supposed to like someone by naming her after the Virgin Mother of God), a cabaret entertainer and Fabian’s much-abused girlfriend. According to the Wikipedia page on the film, “Dassin recalled that the casting of Tierney was in response to a request by Darryl Zanuck, who was concerned that personal problems had rendered the actress ‘suicidal’ and hoped that work would improve her state of mind.” (Tierney did indeed have a nine-year battle with mental illness that only ended in 1964, when she finished her last contracted film at Fox, married a rich oil man from Texas, and retired.)

Aside from Hugh Marlowe, there to play Adam Dunn, the good-guy rival to Fabian for Mary’s affections (and who’s shown as so hapless in the kitchen he actually burns a whole pot of spaghetti), the rest of the cast was filled with those marvelous British actors, including Francis L. Sullivan, Googie Withers, Herbert Lom, and professional wrestlers Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki. The plot casts Fabian as a hustler and con artist who hangs around sporting events and bars determined to latch on to potential suckers he and his associates can fleece. Fabian is also dreaming of creating a more or less legitimate sports business in between all the cons and using them to finance his operations. Previously he palmed off his previous girlfriend, Helen Nosseross (Googie Withers), on a fat and repulsive letch named Philip Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan), who married her and gave her a fur coat, expecting her to “put out” to him for it. The wrestling scene in London is monopolized by Hermes Kristo (Herbert Lom), who puts on staged matches that draw in major crowds. Kristo’s father Gregorius (Stanislaus Zbyszko) is appalled at the putrid spectacle his son has turned wrestling into, and when Fabian watches as father and son have an argument, Fabian swoops in and offers to promote matches between wrestlers in the historically authentic Greco-Roman style. What Fabian doesn’t realize is that just about all his supposed friends and potential financial backers are really in Hermes Kristo’s pocket. Philip Nosseross offers to invest 200 pounds in Fabian’s scheme if Fabian can come up with another investor to match it. Helen secretly sells her fur coat to give Fabian the money in hopes of opening her own nightclub instead of having to settle for working for her husband at the Silver Fox, where not coincidentally Mary works as a singer. (Gene Tierney’s voice was doubled by Maudie Edwards, a British name if there ever was one.) Fabian attempts to play off his various associates against each other, promising Helen help in getting a city license for her club (in fact he gets one from a forger he knows, only the ink on its paper runs when Helen offers a drink to a police officer who stops by to make sure she has the license) while also promising Gregorius he will only stage legitimate wrestling matches.

But when Gregorius and Hermes Kristo’s star wrestler, “The Strangler,” get into a real-life fight at the gym where Fabian is running his bouts (under a grand new sign he’s ordered reading “Fabian Enterprises”), Fabian sees the box-office potential of a bout between old- and new-style wrestlers and sets about paying whatever it will take to get The Strangler into the ring with Gregorius’s protégé, Nikolas of Athens (Ken Richmond). For the first few reels we’re not sure whether to be rooting for Widmark’s character as a lovable con artist fleecing only people more crooked than he is or to loathe him as an amoral creep. Pretty quickly “amoral creep” wins out and the film ends up with Fabian literally running for his life as Hermes Kristo has put out a 1,000-pound offer to anyone who will kill Fabian for him. (Widmark said later he’d lost a lot of weight during the filming from all the running he’d had to do.) The film ends with Fabian pleading with Mary to turn him in, not to the law but to Kristo, so she can get his 1,000-pound reward and pair up with Adam at the end (though the alternate version released in Britain, which was seven minutes longer, made that a good deal clearer than the 96-minute U.S. version we were watching). Night and the City was made at a particularly perilous point in the career of its director, Jules Dassin. Zanuck had got word that Dassin was about to be named as a Hollywood Communist by Edward Dmytryk (one of the original Hollywood Ten who while serving his one-year prison sentence for contempt of Congress decided he shouldn’t throw his career away for a cause he no longer believed in anyway) and blacklisted as a result. So he assigned Dassin to this British-set and British-shot film to get him out of the country and allow him to work on the film undisturbed. Alas, the ploy didn’t work: Dassin was duly named as a Communist and blacklisted, and after Night and the City he didn’t make another film for five years; he later said he’d been reduced to couch-surfing at his friends’ places in Paris until he got a job offer from a French producer to direct a “caper” movie called Rififi (1955), which was a major European hit and re-established Dassin’s career at least on the other side of the Atlantic.

One thing that fascinates me about Night and the City is that Dassin made it two years after The Naked City, a New York-set police procedural that likewise was shot largely on location and took advantage of real-life locales in the city where it took place. According to Fox’s publicity at the time, Night and the City used 54 different London locations and only 14 interior sets. Dassin also said he’d never read Gerald Kerch’s novel until after he completed the film, and he also hadn’t seen John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) before he shot Night and the City even though he was often accused of stealing ideas from Huston’s film. Night and the City got poor to mixed reviews when it came out. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times slammed it; he wrote, “[Dassin's] evident talent has been spent upon a pointless, trashy yarn, and the best that he has accomplished is a turgid pictorial grotesque … he tried to bluff it with a very poor script – and failed … [the screenplay] is without any real dramatic virtue, reason or valid story-line … little more than a mélange of maggoty episodes having to do with the devious endeavors of a cheap London night-club tout to corner the wrestling racket – an ambition in which he fails. And there is only one character in it for whom a decent, respectable person can give a hoot.” That actually makes Night and the City seem ahead of its time in that all too many modern films seem to glory in giving us only unlikable characters, and one of the most cynical aspects of it is that Hermes Kristo and the gangsters in his thrall all end up getting away with everything and continuing to pursue their lives of crime without that no-good American (in Kerch’s novel he was British and merely posing as an American) getting in their way. Night and the City is an odd movie in several ways; when I first saw it I couldn’t get the important plot point about the different styles of wrestling and how crucial they were. But it’s a quite good movie even though it’s also a rather lumpy one; Kerch’s original intent to do a kaleidoscopic portrait of the extent of London’s criminal activity survives at least vestigially in the film, and while some of the characters outside the main part of the plot (notably the drunken hag Philip Nosseross wills his entire enterprise to when he commits suicide after Helen leaves him, and the forger who refuses to shelter Fabian after he knows Kristo is bound and determined to kill him) add to the movie’s appeal, most of the vignettes aren’t that interesting or important. Still, Night and the City is a good movie and a well-done example of film noir.

46th Annual A Capitol Fourth Concert (Capital Concerts, Inc., PBS, aired July 4, 2026)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 4) I watched the 46th annual A Capitol Fourth on PBS, as I usually do every year on the Fourth of July. The show was hosted by Alfonso Ribero, who despite his Latino-sounding name presents as African-American, and it featured some quite interesting performers even though the talent list wasn’t as overwhelming as it’s been in previous years (which featured at least the current rump versions of The Beach Boys and The Temptations). It began with country singer Trace Adkins (son of Rhett Adkins, whose CD I once bought at the Auntie Helen’s thrift store because I liked his basket on the cover) doing a new song called “American Made,” though when Ribero announced it I thought at first the title was “American Maid.” Then country singer Carly Pearce came on to do “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a.k.a. “To Anacreon in Heaven” (the basic melody had been written by British composer John Stafford Smith in the 1770’s for an Oxford University student drinking club called The Anacreontic Society), and did a quite credible job on this insanely difficult melody which you almost have to be drunk to sing decently. (She certainly did a better job than Alexis Wilkins, girlfriend of current FBI director Kash Patel, had at one of President Trump’s celebrations of the official 250th anniversary of American independence.) Afterwards came an interminable medley of hit songs from one of the most annoying bands of all time, Kool and the Gang, a key group in the 1970’s transformation of righteous soul music into disco. They did fragments of songs about “getting down” and “boogieing,” including bits of their two greatest hits (or at least the two songs of theirs I found at least tolerable “in the day”), “Oh, What a Night” and “Celebrate (Good Times).” The next number was another medley, this time of Bobby Darin’s songs from the bio-musical about him, Just in Time: “Beyond the Sea” (which French singer Charles Trenet wrote as a heartfelt, haunting ballad and Darin sped up into a tasteless Vegas lounge song), “Mack the Knife” (which Darin copied from Louis Armstrong’s recording, down to name-checking “Lotte Lenya,” wife of the song’s composer, Kurt Weill), “Dream Lover,” and “Splish Splash.” It was a bit disorienting to hear Darin’s songs in reverse chronological order. Darin’s career can be divided into three periods based on who he was trying to be in each one, first Elvis Presley, then Frank Sinatra, and finally Bob Dylan. (In 1962 he jumped from Atlantic Records’ Atco subsidiary to Capitol because Frank Sinatra had just left Capitol to found his own label, Reprise; he’d took Dean Martin with him; and thus the “Italian-American Crooner” slot at Capitol was wide open and Darin, born Walden Robert Cassoto, filled it.) Hearing his songs in reverse order like this isn’t true to his real-life story. But it was still fun.

Next Gary Sinise, who usually co-hosts the annual Memorial Day Concert (actually more of a spoken-word tribute to America’s military heroes with bits of song interspersed than a real concert) with Joe Mantegna (who’s dropped out of the last two Memorial Day shows for health reasons), came on to introduce the Artemis II astronauts who’d just orbited the moon for the first time since 1972. Given that only two of the four crew members are white men – one is an African-American male and one is a white woman – they are the stuff of which Trump’s and Pete Hegseth’s nightmares are made, though that didn’t stop Trump from inviting them to his own 250th anniversary celebration on the National Mall and hideously mangling his introduction of them. (Trump said “NASA” as if he’d never heard of it before.) Then the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly (who’s been leading this concert since its founding pops conductor, Erich Kunzel, died in 2009), played a thoroughly banal main theme from Bill Conti’s score for the movie The Right Stuff as a supposed tribute to the Artemis II astronauts. After that Patti Labelle came out to do the song “The House I Live In,” written by composer Earl Robinson and lyricist Abel Meeropol (as “Lewis Allen”) and introduced by Frank Sinatra in a 1945 short film dealing with racial prejudice. Though the song was actually first sung by a man named Mordecai Bauman in a 1942 stage revue called Let Freedom Sing, it became identified with Sinatra and he sang it for the rest of his career, even after his politics moved steadily Rightward over time. Had Patti Labelle sung it with the quiet dignity of Sinatra’s versions (especially the one in the 1945 film and the performance he gave at the inaugural gala for President John F. Kennedy in 1961), it could have been one of the high points of the program. Instead she way over-ornamented it much the way she’d done with her ghastly 1980’s cover of “Over the Rainbow,” and she gave so overwrought a performance she literally knocked over her mike stand at the end. After that Carly Pearce came back and did Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” and while she stuck to the “safe” verses as usual (I know it’s too much to hope for to hear the full version of “This Land Is Your Land” with its radical message intact on this occasion) and didn’t sing it with the passion Lauren Alaina gave it in 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLAVn-sKfEY), she still did quite a good job on this much-abused song.

After that they brought on the U.S. Army Old Fife and Drum Corps for “Yankee Doodle” as an introduction to a tribute to the U.S. military, which featured active-duty servicemembers giving little statements on why they serve. It climaxed with Trace Adkins doing a quite moving song called “He’s Still a Soldier.” Then, after a performance of “This Is My Country” by the Joint Armed Forces Chorus, African-American opera star Angel Blue turned in a scorching rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” that could have given Patti Labelle lessons in just how far to ornament a song without crossing over into the bounds of tastelessness. There followed a performance of “America, the Beautiful” by country star Alan Jackson beamed in from Nashville, and though I could have done without the deliberately torn jeans he was wearing, he turned in a tasteful, understated performance that belies country music’s reputation as an emotionally overwrought genre. After that the National Symphony Orchestra played John Williams’s “Olympic Fanfare” as part of a tribute to the U.S. men’s and women’s Olympic and Paralympic successes this year. Then followed a medley of songs by the jazz-rock band Chicago, or what’s left of them given how many of the founding members, including guitarist Terry Kath and reedman Walt Parazaider, are dead. They opened their three-song medley with “Saturday in the Park,” probably because it contains the line, “Must have been the Fourth of July,” which just happened to fall on a Saturday this year. Then they played “Stronger Every Day” and “25 or 6 to 4,” and the fireworks display started during Chicago’s last song. Incidentally they were set off this year from George Washington’s old home at Mount Vernon because Donald Trump’s “Freedom 250” show pre-empted their usual staging area on the National Mall. The fireworks continued during “Let Freedom Ring” by the Joint Armed Forces Chorus and the typically truncated five-minute version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with added cannons, gunshots, and a chorus singing the Russian Tsarist national anthem whenever Tchaikovsky quotes it in the score. (The politics of playing the 1812 Overture on these occasions were weird enough during the Cold War and got even weirder now that it’s a story of an historically autocratic Russian state beating back a French government that had been founded in a revolution but had been taken over by an authoritarian.) The closing numbers were the U.S. Army Band playing a patriotic medley of “Yankee Doodle,” “The Caisson Song,” and George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag”; Lauren Allred singing a quite nice version of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” (ironically a song Woody Guthrie hated and wrote “This Land Is Your Land” as an answer to!); and the National Symphony wrapping things up with John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” as the closing credits came up. All in all, it was a fun show, not as exalting as this concert has been in previous years, but a far cry from the propagandistic orgy of pseudo-patriotism going on nearby at the Washington Mall featuring a typically hateful, divisive speech by Donald Trump.

Now, Voyager (Warner Bros., 1942)

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

Two nights ago (Wednesday, July 1) Turner Classic Movies ran a double bill of Paul Henried’s two most famous films: Now, Voyager and Casablanca. I’ve already written extensively about Casablanca and posted to moviemagg about it twice, in 2012 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/casablanca-warner-bros-1942.html) and 2017 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/05/casablanca-warner-bros-1942.html). So I’ll concentrate my current comments on Now, Voyager. Now, Voyager was based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, whose most famous book was Stella Dallas, and as you might suspect from that ancestry it’s a double-barreled assault on the tear ducts. It was turned into a movie by screenwriter Casey Robinson (who was also involved in Casablanca: he wrote the love scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman but, because at that time he was taking credit only for scripts he’d written entirely by himself, he declined credit for Casablanca and thereby did himself out of an Academy Award) and director Irving Rapper, who was deservedly proud of it. Rapper cast the film himself, though the original plan was to have Irene Dunne star as Charlotte Vale, the old-maid aunt of a well-to-do Boston family who’s an ugly duckling transformed into a beautiful swan through a stint at the Cascades sanitarium in Vermont and the therapy of super-psychologist Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains). Bette Davis was incensed that anyone other than her was considered for the role, especially since the character was from Boston, as she was herself, and she didn’t see why Jack Warner should pay the higher fee for a free-lancer when he already had Davis under contract. Eventually Davis got the part and turned in an indelible performance as both sides of the Charlotte Vale character. The title comes from Walt Whitman’s poem Songs of Parting: “The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,/ Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”

Director Irving Rapper told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse that he cast the film himself: “I was starting to sail high, and they gave me my head.” The biggest bit of casting was Ilka Chase as Lisa Vale, Charlotte’s domineering mother from hell. It seems that Charlotte was the last of her children and was born quite a few years later than her three previous ones, all sons. As a result, Lisa never let Charlotte forget that her very existence was an inconvenience for her, and Lisa intended to get back at Charlotte by totally dominating her life and holding the threat of disinheritance over Charlotte if she ever got out of line. There’s a crucial flashback sequence in which she was taking a cruise and was romanced by one of the ship’s officers, radio operator Leslie Trotter (Charles Drake, later Judy Garland’s “boy next door” in Meet Me in St. Louis and the male romantic lead in the Marx Brothers’ spoof A Night in Casablanca), only both Lisa Vale and the ship’s captain went out of their way to break them up. The film opens with Lisa Vale summoning Dr. Jaquith to the Vale family mansion to discuss treating Charlotte, who’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Charlotte spends most of her time in her room carving elaborate jewelry boxes made of ivory, and Jaquith sees one and is impressed by her craftspersonship. Eventually Charlotte spends three months at Cascades (inspired, according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, by the real-life Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which focused on physical, occupational, and talk therapy and totally avoided lobotomies and the other major surgical interventions that were standard treatments for mental illness elsewhere), and when we see her again she’s doffed the shapeless dresses she wore at home. Instead she’s on the gangway of a ship dressed in a stylish gown and wearing a large sun hat, though she’s still prone to gestures that illustrate her former shyness. (In fact one of the best aspects of Bette Davis’s acting in this film is the brief bits in which she reverts to the behaviors of the old Charlotte Vale even after she becomes the new one.) The cruise she’s taking is to South America, and on board she meets Jerry Durrance (Paul Henried), an unhappily married former architect turned financier.

Jerry admits early on in his relationship with Charlotte that he’s married and has three kids, two sons and a daughter born, like Charlotte herself, much later than the other two. We never actually see Mrs. Durrance, though Robinson’s script drops a hint that she’s become an invalid and that raises the possibility that they might have considered having her die of natural causes so Jerry and Charlotte could get together. Much to the credit of both Olive Higgins Prouty and Casey Robinson, that doesn’t happen; instead Jerry and Charlotte drift into an uncertain affair that pushed the boundaries of the Production Code big-time, especially when they’re stranded in the Brazilian countryside after their driver, Giuseppe (an odd comic-relief performance by Frank Puglia, who usually played thugs), crashes their car off a cliff. One of the most famous scenes in the film had its origins in a part of the book in which a man lights a match, passes the burning match to his female partner, then she lights her cigarette with the match, passes it back to him, and he lights his own cigarette. When Paul Henried and Bette Davis tried this on screen, the match kept burning out before they could complete the scene and often burned their fingers. So an exasperated Henried told Rapper, “Why don’t I just put two cigarettes in my mouth, light both of them, and hand one to Bette?” That became one of the favorite scenes in the film and a lot of real-life couples copied it, though over the years Rapper pointed to at least two previous films that had shown that bit of business, a D. W. Griffith silent from 1917 and The Rich Are Always With Us, a 1932 film starring Ruth Chatterton, George Brent, and (in a minor role) Bette Davis herself. After her ship comes home and she returns to her mom’s house after her uncertain relationship with Jerry, Charlotte falls into a sort-of affair with another young Bostonian from a well-to-do family, Elliot Livingston (British actor John Loder, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage and later one of Hedy Lamarr’s husbands). Her mom is thrilled at the idea that the Livingston and Vale fortunes will be united by this marriage, but Charlotte bails on it because she’s not in love with him ¬– as is effectively dramatized by a scene at a Boston Symphony concert where she sits between Elliot and Jerry as the orchestra plays the big sentimental second subject of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony.

Ultimately she returns to The Cascades for a refresher course, where she meets Tina (Janis Wilson), Jerry’s 12-year-old daughter. Noting the similarities between Tina’s background and her own, Charlotte reaches out to her and starts insisting to Jaquith and his staff that she can be more help to Tina than they can. Charlotte asks to be allowed to take Tina back to Boston with her, and Jaquith agrees as long as she promises not to use that as an excuse to resume her affair with Tina’s dad. Charlotte and Tina even end up in bed together, which in 1942 was undoubtedly read much more innocently than it would be in a modern film. Ultimately Lisa Vale dies without having carried through on her threats to disinherit Charlotte, and Charlotte ends up with the bulk of the Vale family fortune. The ending reminded Charles of the 1949 film The Heiress, based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square (1880), also about a rather mousy young woman who’s raised by a domineering single parent (a father instead of a mother this time) and who has to shut down her romantic side after falling for a wastrel who just wanted her for her money. (When Charles and I watched The Heiress together Charles resented the ending, in which the heiress, played by Bette Davis’s lifelong friend Olivia de Havilland, leaves her boyfriend, played by Montgomery Clift, futilely knocking on her door in the rain. Charles said that by locking him out she was condemning herself to a sexless life, and I pointed out that in 1880 if a woman married, her property automatically became her husband’s. The legal protections that now exist for a well-to-do woman marrying a not-so-well-to-do man that give her ways to shield her fortune from him weren’t available then.) Now, Voyager didn’t seem like The Heiress to me, mainly because in Now, Voyager the man who romances the heiress is genuinely in love with her and they can’t get together because he has a wife already, not because he’s a gold-digger after her fortune. Indeed, Charlotte helps Jerry materially by lobbying Dr. Jaquith to give him the job of designing a new wing for The Cascades, thereby enabling him to resume the career he really wanted all along. Director Rapper said of Now, Voyager, “The story wasn’t that good, more or less Cosmopolitan magazine level, but what made that picture great was brilliant acting.” He also said it was the first film he made that contained a scene with rain, which later became a trademark for him.

Young Frankenstein (Gruskoff/Venture Films, Crossbow Productions, Jouer Limited, 20th Century-Fox, 1974)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 28) my husband Charles and I watched a film we hadn’t seen in a while but regard as one of our favorites: Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974). According to Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, it came about in a casual conversation between Brooks and Gene Wilder on the set of their immediately previous film, Blazing Saddles (1974), in which Wilder told Brooks that he’d like their next film to be a parody of the classic Universal Frankenstein monster films. Wilder also stipulated that Brooks could direct it but should not be in it, even though Brooks did work his way into three audio-only bit parts (he’s listed on the film’s imdb.com page as “Werewolf,” “Cat Hit By Dart,” and “Victor Frankenstein [Voice]”). According to a cover story published by Newsweek when the film was first released, Wilder and Brooks fought all through the making of the film, always over the same issue: Wilder wanted the humor to be more subtle, Brooks wanted it more broad. TCM host Ben Mankiewicz told an anecdote I’d never heard before: the great scene in which Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) and the Monster (Peter Boyle, billed second; in the original 1931 Frankenstein Boris Karloff was billed fourth) appear on stage and do a dance number to Irving Berlin’s song “Puttin’ On the Ritz” was entirely Wilder’s idea. Brooks didn’t want to shoot it; Wilder spent 20 minutes arguing with him over the scene, and finally Brooks said, “If you care about it so much you’re willing to argue with me for 20 minutes over it, it goes in.” It’s one of the highlights of the film! Brooks and Wilder insisted that the movie be shot in black-and-white to reproduce the look of the Universal films they were parodying – which cost them their original distribution deal with Columbia. No problem: Brooks and Wilder simply went down the block to 20th Century-Fox, whose production head, Alan Ladd, Jr., agreed to make the film in black-and-white. (Ladd was the visionary who accepted George Lucas’s Star Wars for production after 12 other studios and production chiefs had turned it down.) It’s ironic that Young Frankenstein is now older (52 years) than the original Universal films it was lampooning were when it was made (43 years after the original Frankenstein, 39 years after The Bride of Frankenstein, and 35 years after Son of Frankenstein). It’s also a film that arguably shouldn’t have worked at all given that it was parodying something that was already a parody; director James Whale and writers William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston had already made fun of the original Frankenstein mythos in The Bride of Frankenstein, ramping up the comic-relief elements to a point at which they were at least as important as the horror aspects. In a way Brooks and Wilder (especially Brooks) replaced Whale’s and Balderston’s campy British Gay humor with out-and-out Borscht Belt schtick.

Young Frankenstein emerged as a beautifully balanced film, containing enough raunchy sex jokes to please the most jaded Mel Brooks devotée (including the one between Gene Wilder and Teri Garr, much less annoying than usual, that ends the film), but also with genuine moments of subtlety and wit (his send-up of the scene with the blind hermit from The Bride of Frankenstein, with the late Gene Hackman superb as the hermit who accidentally lights the Monster’s finger while trying to light his cigar for him, is quite bittersweet in its humor). It's also ironic that while Young Frankenstein was shooting in Great Britain, another crew under contract to 20th Century-Fox was filming a quite different parody of the Frankenstein mythos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and while that’s a great movie (I once paired it with The Bride of Frankenstein and told Charles we were going to watch “the two Gayest versions of the Frankenstein story”) it pales by comparison to Young Frankenstein. Indeed, while Young Frankenstein satirized the Universal Frankenstein films, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was much more a spoof of the Hammer remakes. Dr. Frank N. Furter even created his monster in a giant fish tank that had previously been used in Hammer’s first foray into the myth, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), while for Young Frankenstein Brooks scored all the original lab equipment that had been built by Kenneth Strickfaden for the Universal films. Strickfaden had retained ownership of all that gear and had merely rented it to studios that wanted to use it, and as of 1974 it was all sitting in his garage until Brooks learned about it and arranged to use it even though that meant it all had to be taken to Britain. Brooks even gave Strickfaden the screen credit he’d deserved on the originals but hadn’t been granted. Strickfaden’s involvement puts both Boris Karloff and Mel Brooks two degrees of separation from Bix Beiderbecke, since Charles Strickfaden, Kenneth’s brother, had been a reed player in Paul Whiteman’s band when Bix was in it from 1927 to 1929. And there’s an even closer association to a jazz great in Young Frankenstein than that: Marty Feldman, who exploded onto the movie world as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant Igor (pronounced “EYE-gor” instead of the usual “EE-gor,” a gag I suspect Brooks got from the 1933 horror classic Mystery of the Wax Museum, which was also the source for the gag in which Feldman’s head, labeled “Freshly Dead,” appears at the end of a series of skulls), was the brother of Victor Feldman, who’d played piano for Miles Davis in the early 1960’s. (Miles fired Victor Feldman in the middle of recording his troubled album Seven Steps to Heaven and replaced him with Herbie Hancock.)

While Young Frankenstein is mainly based on the first three Universal Frankenstein films, it also is full of in-jokes from other movies; Brooks and Wilder moved the setting to Transylvania (Mary Shelley’s original novel had been set in Switzerland, where she’d been living when she wrote it) and couldn’t resist cribbing from the Universal Dracula as well. All those vertiginous stone stairways with no rails, as well as the rat-infested cellar where the earlier Victor Frankenstein concealed his equipment and even the opening scene, when an emissary from Castle Frankenstein tries to wrest a box from Victor’s cold, dead hands so he can take it to New York and give it to Victor’s grandson Frederick, are from the Dracula rather than the Frankenstein mythos. The scene at the theatre in which the Monster goes berserk after he and Dr. Frankenstein do their song-and-dance to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (one wonders how Brooks and Wilder got permission from the still-living and infamously fiercely protective of his intellectual property Irving Berlin to use his song in that bizarre context) and the audience flees in terror is a pretty obvious cop from the 1933 King Kong. And there’s an even more oddball reference to Richard Cunha’s 1958 film Frankenstein’s Daughter in which the grandson of the original Victor Frankenstein angrily reacts to being called by his full last name and snaps, “Here my name is Frank!” That makes it even more ironic that the imdb.com cast list for Young Frankenstein includes an actor whose name is Clement von Franckenstein, indicated as playing the “Villager Screaming at the Monster from the Bars.” Young Frankenstein cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld flawlessly reproduced the look of the Universal films that were the inspiration. I particularly liked the use of iris-ins and iris-outs and some of the other oddball transitions that were part of the basic grammar of film (iris shots actually pretty much went out with the silent era but the wipes used extensively in this film were quite common in the early 1930’s), and given the cold war between directors and cinematographers over moving-camera shots (directors liked them, cinematographers didn’t because they took too long to light), it’s ironic that Young Frankenstein begins with an elaborate and quite long moving-camera shot. The film is also quite creative in its use of music, even though John Morris’s background score, though perfectly fine, doesn’t have the demented imagination Franz Waxman brought to the music for The Bride of Frankenstein.