Bend of the River (Universal-International, copyright 1951, released 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, April 17) my husband Charles and I watched the third of the six movies in the James Stewart Westerns collection on Universal DVD’s: Bend of the River. The omens were pretty good on this one: the director was Anthony Mann, who had previously made Winchester ‘73 with some of the same cast members (James Stewart, Rock Hudson, Jay C. Flippen), and the writer was Borden Chase (adapting a novel called Bend of the Snake by one William Gulick), who’d written Winchester ‘73 as well as Red River, two of the all-time greatest Western films. Alas, the magic didn’t gel this time around, and it’s hard to tell what went wrong. Bend of the River is about a wagon train of prospective homesteaders en route to Oregon to set up farms. Their guide is Glyn McLyntock (James Stewart) – one wonders why his name is spelled so pretentiously when throughout the movie I’d assumed it was “Glenn McLintock” – and on the way there he rescues an outlaw named Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) from a lynch mob who are trying to hang him for stealing a horse. (One wonders if the horse he rides off on in Glyn’s company is the horse he was accused of stealing.) The two team up despite the misgivings of the paterfamilias, Jeremy Baile (Jay C. Flippen), and his two daughters, Laura (Julie Adams) and Marjie (Lori Nelson, in her first film). Ironically, Julie Adams was the female lead in the first Creature from the Black Lagoon and Lori Nelson was the female lead in its sequel, Revenge of the Creature.

The would-be homesteaders make a deal with steamboat owner Tom Hendricks (Howard Petrie) to hold their belongings in Portland until September 1, when Hendricks will ship them to their camp. Among the items they are expecting are food supplies they will need to get them through the winter until they can start growing their own in the spring. The homesteaders cut down enough trees to establish a clearing and build their houses, and they wait for the supplies to arrive … and they wait … and they wait. Now it’s the middle of October, they’re running out of flour and bacon, and they will starve unless the supplies arrive. Glyn volunteers to ride to Portland to find out what happened, and when he gets to Portland he finds it’s a wide-open town full of gunfighting, drinking, gambling and the other Western vices. Hendricks explains that there’s been a gold rush – I’ve been unable to find out when this film takes place, and Google was no help because there were at least three Oregon gold rushes, one in 1850 before the big one in California, one from 1861 to 1870 and one in the 1890’s just before the big one in Alaska. He’s decided to renege on his deal with the settlers because he can get a lot more for his flour and whatnot by selling it to the miners at the inflated prices typical of resource rushes. Glyn makes vague promises to some of the locals, led by Shorty (the young Harry Morgan), to help him steal the stuff from Hendricks – only they decide midway through the journey that they’d rather divert the stuff to the gold miners who will pay inflated prices for it. About all Glyn has going for him in keeping the shipment on its way to the homesteaders is gambler Trey Wilson (Rock Hudson) and Emerson Cole – who switches sides in mid-journey and aligns with the renegades until Glyn and he have a big fight in the middle of the river that ends with Glyn drowning Emerson. (At this point we’re thinking that it would have been better if Glyn had let the lynchers hang Emerson in the first reel. But then again we wouldn’t have the fun of watching Arthur Kennedy’s great performance in the role; he practically steals the movie.)

Ultimately Bend of the River is entertaining but nothing special, and I’m not sure where it went wrong. Part of the problem may have been that it’s in color: after the mega-success of Winchester ‘73 in black-and-white Universal-International made another percentage deal with James Stewart (reportedly he’d made $600,000 off his share of Winchester ‘73 and $750,000 off his share in this one) and decided to ramp up the budget by shooting it at the tail end of the three-strip Technicolor era. But, quite frankly, the color works against the values of this story; it needed the cool, dark beauty of red-filtered black-and-white. Part of it also might be that, as Charles said afterwards, aside from a brief run-in between the settlers and a few Shoshone Indians early on whose only plot significance is that Julie Adams’ character gets an arrowhead stuck in her shoulder (and the main woman on the wagon train, Mrs. Prentiss, played by Frances Bavier, insists that they drive as gently as possible for the next month until she heals), Bend of the River doesn’t really seem that much like a Western. Charles said it was basically an exploration film about colonization and imperialism, and it could have been set in Africa or the South Seas or anywhere else in the world where whites were lording it over people of color. Bend of the River is a good movie rather than a great one, and while it’s indicative of the way James Stewart was trying to keep his career going by hardening his image – there’s a clip from the film included in the trailer in which, reacting to Emerson’s change of sides, Glyn gives him a low-keyed threat that he’ll be looking over Emerson’s shoulder wherever he goes until he finally catches up with him, and he sounds amazingly like his long-time friend and occasional co-star John Wayne – he’d already proven he could act a Western tough guy in Winchester ‘73 and he didn’t need to do it again. The trailer also references Julie Adams’s character as a woman who “made the mistake of falling in love with two men” – though that’s only sequentially, not simultaneously (she takes up with Emerson in wide-open Portland and then ends up with Glyn after Emerson’s death) – and when it then mentioned Rock Hudson I couldn’t help but joke, “He also made the mistake of falling in love with men.”

Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, part 3: “Ides of March,” (GBH Educational Foundation, WGBH, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, April 16) PBS showed “Ides of March,” the last in a three-part mini-series on the life and career of Julius Caesar called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’ve long suspected the producers of this show (the BBC in association with PBS and various other companies) were deliberately out to make a parallel between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump. Both Caesar and Trump essentially slammed their way into absolute political power and overthrew long-established republics (500 years in Caesar’s case, 250 years in Trump’s) by total unscrupulousness and utter indifference to social norms, as well as direct appeals to “the people” against the “elites” who were supposedly ham-stringing the political system so it could not deliver what “the people” really wanted. Of course, Caesar’s playbook has been used time and time again by both Right-wing and Left-wing demagogues in various countries ever since: in France by Robespierre and later Napoleon, in Germany by the Kaiser (whose title, like “Czar,” derives from “Caesar”) and then by Hitler, in Russia by Lenin, Stalin and eventually Putin, along with other modern-day tyrants like Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Victor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (until he lost power seeking re-election and, like Trump, claimed that the election had been “stolen” from him and staged a coup to try to retain power), Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Javier Milei in Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy (representing a party that’s the lineal descendant of the first Fascists led by Benito Mussolini in 1922) and others around the world. The PBS.org home page for “Ides of March,” https://www.pbs.org/video/ides-of-march-xkgyxs/, describes it thusly: “As Caesar takes control of Rome and consolidates his grip over the Republic, his ambition turns to tyranny. A handful of senators plot to end his rule in the only way they can: by taking his life. But will it be enough to save the Republic?”

The first two episodes, “High Priest” and “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered,” his slogan upon winning the war in Gaul – modern-day France – that cemented his position as the most powerful man in Rome), told a story of how a man with no particular sense of morality made and then broke alliances with others to pursue his own path to power. I remember a history book I studied from in grade school which presented Caesar as an altogether positive figure – it had chapter headings reading “The Sickness of Rome” and “The Physician: Julius Caesar” – but that’s decidedly not how this show, produced and directed by Emma Frank, sees him. The ancient Roman constitution (which, like the current British constitution, was unwritten and relied mostly on an agreed-upon set of political and social norms which Caesar deliberately upended) provided for an office called Dictator in which the Roman Senate could appoint someone and give them absolute power. But it was only supposed to be for a limited time, at most six months. The Dictator was only appointed in case of a national emergency – usually an attack from an enemy – and was supposed to relinquish power and hand it back to the elected officials as soon as the emergency was over. Not for Caesar: he first demanded an appointment as Dictator for ten years – which the Senate reluctantly gave him with the proviso that it would have to come up for renewal every year – and then he demanded to be made Dictator for life. Caesar also demanded that he sit at the head of the Senate, between the two elected Consuls that were the Roman heads of state – essentially declaring himself above the law and the ultimate authority over Rome. Among the powers he took for himself was the ability to appoint the magistrates, who served under the consuls and essentially ran the Senate, instead of allowing them to be elected directly. Caesar also had made for himself a gold version of the laurel wreath Roman consuls traditionally wore around their heads as a symbol of their authority, and to many observers it looked like a crown.

This was an especially sore point among many Romans because originally Rome had been ruled by kings, only the seventh and last one, Tyrannus Superbus (whose name has entered the language as the word “tyrant,” meaning an unscrupulous and evil absolute ruler) was deposed in a coup led by a direct ancestor of Brutus, who in 44 B.C. had wormed his way into Caesar’s inner circle. “It's a quite extraordinary thing, a really, really explicit contravention of Roman customary practice,” says retired history professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill on the program about Caesar’s demand to be made dictator for life. “The entire idea of the non-monarchical state is that no one has power in perpetuity.” Another historian interviewed for the program, Tom Holland, says, “Caesar's preponderance has made the traditional function of the Senate, the role of the helmsman guiding the ship of state, essentially irrelevant. Caesar is too impatient, too unsubtle not to let his fellow senators know that he knows this.” Holland mentions Brutus’s role in the plot to kill Caesar. The Roman Senators who want to get rid of him know they have to do that by March 15 – the so-called “Ides of March” holiday – because right after that Caesar is scheduled to leave on another military campaign against the Parthian empire (mostly in modern-day Iran, though at its height it stretched from Turkey to Afghanistan and Pakistan and encompassed the so-called “Fertile Crescent” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq as well). Caesar, says Holland, “sees Brutus as if he's a son who he's looked after, cherished, and promoted. Now, Caesar promises Brutus fantastic things. He's gonna get a key appointment this year, and this will all put him on track for a consulship in the future as well. It’s a really bittersweet moment for Brutus. On the one hand, he is climbing that ladder of offices. The consulship is in reach. But at the same time, he doesn't like the fact that Caesar is centralizing all of this power around himself. But in the end, he's able to shrug it off because at the moment, he's benefiting from the system.”

Caesar tests the waters of whether the Roman people are ready to accept him as, essentially, a king by staging an elaborate ceremony in which his loyal and trusted assistant, Mark Antony, will offer him a diadem – essentially a crown – instead of the gold replica of a laurel wreath he’s been wearing. But when he notices that the audience reacts negatively at the sight of Caesar being offered a crown, he gets the message and pushes the damned thing away. Caesar gets at least two warnings of his impending assassination, one from a priest named Spurinna and one from his wife, Calpurnia, who’s had a dream about him being assassinated in the Senate and pleads with him not to go. But one of the conspirators against him, Decimus – a long-standing ally of Caesar but one who, like Brutus and fellow conspirators Cassius and Cicero, has got disillusioned with him – goes to Caesar to convince him to attend the latest session of the Senate after all. “Decimus says to Caesar, ‘This is behavior unbecoming of you,’” Holland explains. “‘What – what am I supposed to go and tell the Senate? That you're scared of shadows, that you're obedient to a woman's importunities? This is not behavior appropriate to Caesar.’” So Caesar goes to the Senate and gets knifed to death by 20 to 30 people, each of whom decided to take a role in the assassination so it could not be blamed on any one person. Unfortunately, the death of Caesar does not restore the Roman Republic; after yet another Roman civil war Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian takes absolute power and declares himself Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. The Roman Empire, like the Republic, lasts for 500 years in the West (and another 1,000 in the East as the Byzantine Empire, which splits off from its parent and holds out until 1453, when it’s conquered by the Ottoman Turks), and Rome becomes the paradigmatic historical example of a self-governing society that collapsed through the greed and hunger for power of a single determined individual.

The historians interviewed for the “Ides of March” episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator make this point explicitly in the closing minutes of the documentary. Tom Holland says, “I think the tragedy of the Roman Republic is that its greatest man, the man who in so many ways exemplified all its qualities to an absolute pitch of achievement, those achievements brought the Roman Republic crashing down into rubble.” Classics professor Jeffrey Tatum says, “When Julius Caesar commenced his political career, he could never have imagined that the Roman Republic would come to an end, and he certainly couldn't have imagined that he would be the agent that brought that about. And yet, that's what happened in a very short time. What are the lessons for modern representational systems that are not nearly so old? Could modern democracy collapse? Perhaps we simply take our political norms for granted.” Rory Stewart, a former British cabinet member, says, “There was a moment where the Roman Republic seemed the most perfect political state on earth. Then it had got itself into trouble. And this reminds us a bit of our own period. From about 1989, democracy was on the rise. The number of democracies in the world doubled, and then a period of deep, deep uncertainty began, including the rise of populism. And it's in that environment authoritarianism thrives, that strong men come forward to challenge democracy.” British constitutional lawyer and scholar Shami Chakrabarti says, “I think the Caesar story really is a wake-up call. Democracy has to be constantly fought for. If we take it for granted, a new Caesar will come.” And it seems quite likely, given his ability to overcome obstacles that would have sunk the political careers of lesser men and the almost god-like adulation he receives from millions of Americans, that the new Caesar has indeed arrived and his name is Donald Trump.

PBS "Frontline," April 16, 2024: "Children of Ukraine" (GBH Educational Foundation, WGBH, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the third and last part of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, PBS showed a new episode of its long-running Frontline documentary series called “Children of Ukraine,” about how up to 150,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken out of Ukraine into Russia. There they’re sent into “camps” and essentially brainwashed into denying or forgetting their former identity as Ukrainians and accepting a new one as Russians, including being forced to sing patriotic songs about Russia and ultimately being adopted by Russian families. “Basically, they try to erase our identity as Ukrainians,” said one of the parents of these children. “They try to impose their distorted version of history. We're still hoping to bring them back home. They are still our children.” Some of the “children” involved are actually teenage boys who are worrying that they may soon be drafted in the Russian Army and forced to fight against their countrymen. “Russia has said it's been relocating Ukrainian children as part of a mass humanitarian effort,” said Frontline’s familiar narrator, Will Lyman. “A year into the war, President Vladimir Putin held a televised rally featuring children thanking Russian soldiers for rescuing them. … In a statement, the Russian government told us that Ukrainian children have been relocated to ensure their safety and to provide medical care and education.” The relocation effort to move Ukrainian children to Russia is under the direction of Maria Lvova-Belova, who’s shown in the documentary. She says she has adopted five children herself, including one from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was gutted and essentially destroyed by Russian attacks.

The “Children of Ukraine” documentary opens with a scene at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands in which arrest warrants were sworn out against Lvova-Belova and her boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, on charges the Russian government called “outrageous.” “A team of Ukrainian investigators is now collecting evidence they are hoping will be used for the International Criminal Court case,” Lyman explained. “They work for a human rights group, the IPHR [International Partnership for Human Rights], and are traveling through recently liberated territories across Ukraine.” IPHR’s Web site is https://iphronline.org, and though they claim to have “cooperated with civil society groups in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus,” virtually all the Web tabs linked to on IPHR’s home page are for sites in the former Soviet Union. “Our mission is to find families whose children are missing till this day,” an IPHR spokesperson told Frontline. “And we're trying to collect all the evidence and information about such cases so that our lawyers could qualify it after, whether it was a war crime or a crime against humanity.” They’re shown in the documentary working with another group called Save Ukraine (https://www.saveukraineua.org), and their Web page includes a link to a CBS-TV 60 Minutes story from November 19, 2023, also about the alleged abductions of Ukrainian children and their indoctrination into Russian identity and culture before they’re adopted by Russian parents (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukrainians-accuse-russia-of-abducting-indoctrinating-children-60-minutes-transcript/).

One of the cases shown in the documentary is Maxim, a four-year-old boy whose grandmother tried to place him with older relatives after his mom was killed in a Russian attack on their car. Maxim’s mother was killed in the assault, but his two older siblings – a brother and a sister – survived. But Maxim was taken and later his surviving relatives saw a photo of someone who looked like him in a Russian catalog of young children available for adoption. A teenage boy named Arkem had a particularly harrowing experience in Russian custody, According to the show, he was taken to the Perevalsk Special Correctional Boarding School in Luhansk, a Russian-controlled area of eastern Ukraine. There his cell phone was confiscated so he couldn’t call his parents and tell them where he was, and he was forced to sing the Russian national anthem and wear uniforms with the letter “Z,” a symbol of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. “The Russian government said in its statement that Artem and his fellow students had been relocated to protect them from Ukrainian shelling, and that Russia had tried to contact the children’s families,” narrator Lyman explained. “They said it’s ‘hardly surprising’ that a Russian school would have ‘due regard for national symbols, including the country's flag and anthem.’” Six months after he was captured, Artem – who in the meantime was scared he would be drafted into Russia’s military and forced to fight against his fellow Ukrainians – was reunited with his mother after she took a long, circuitous journey through Poland and Belarus before finally rendezvousing with her son in Crimea in Russian-occupied south Ukraine.

Among the ironies of this show was the sheer number of people in it who were wearing T-shirts with English logos and other writing, including the sporting-goods maker The North Face; and the fact that the U.S. and Canada did something similar in the 1890’s and for decades afterwards. After major Native American resistance to U.S. occupation ended with the December 29, 1890 Native defeat at the battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the U.S. government adopted a policy called “forced assimilation.” Native children were rounded up and sent to special “Indian schools” where they were forcibly indoctrinated into the ways of white American culture and, like the Ukrainian children held hostage by Russians, were punished severely if they spoke their native language or tried to hold on to their people’s traditional customs. In another PBS documentary (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/buffy-saintemarie-carry-it-on-eagle.html), Canadian Cree Indian folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie recalled being subjected to this abuse, including being kidnapped from her parents and adopted by a white family where she was subjected to physical, including sexual, abuse that lasted until she was old enough to go to college. The stated rationale behind this program was to “kill the Indian to save the man.”

Sounds and Swells 2024 (Hausmann Quartet, Art of Elan, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, April 15) I went to the San Diego Public Library for an unusual, to say the least, event called Sounds and Swells, which combined live string quartet music by the Hausmann Quartet (whom my husband Charles and I had seen earlier just before Easter performing Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross at Verbatim Books with interspersed readings by local writers) with surfing films. The Hausmann Quartet’s Web site explained the program thusly: “Join us for the return of Sounds and Swells! As part of this season’s San Diego Central Library Cinema & Sounds series, this collaboration between the Hausmann Quartet and Art of Elan at the Library’s Neil Morgan Auditorium features live music by Claude Debussy, Terry Riley, Franz Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Schubert accompanying local surfing footage from McCracken Films and Joey Taylor Photography. This concert is free and open to the public.” Art of Elan is a local nonprofit that describes its mission as follows: “Known for its collaborative spirit, Art of Elan has been pioneering unique events and bringing exciting classical music to diverse audiences for over 16 years through innovative partnerships and bi-national initiatives that have cultivated curious audiences on both sides of the border.” The concert was curated (whatever that means in this context; I’m guessing he selected both the film clips and the live pieces that accompanied them) by Dr. Eric Starr, a tall, rail-thin man who’s boyishly handsome even though he’s also visibly getting on in years. He looks like an aging surfer who still likes to hang out at the beach even though he probably doesn’t do much surfing anymore. Dr. Starr is listed on the San Diego State University Web site as “Studio Artist Teacher of Trombone and Euphonium; Lecturer of Music: Brass Chamber Music Program Advisor – Music, Entrepreneurship and Business Degree, Brass Area Coordinator, Internship Coordinator,” a quite impressive set of credentials.

The program featured professionally shot footage of 10 surfing sites around the world (though the clips were grouped into just six segments) accompanied by the Hausmann Quartet’s performances of music by Claude Debussy, Terry Riley, Franz Josef Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, Lou Harrison and Franz Schubert. The surfing footage was mostly quite good and showed the amazing skill of the surfers involved as they were seen mostly “shooting the curl” – surfing under the crest of a breaking wave. The opening sequence, shot at Teahupo’o, Tahiti, was quite the best; set to the last movement (“Trés moderé; trés animé”) of Debussy’s String Quartet, Op. 10, it featured spectacular footage of excellent surfers, some of it in real time and some in slow motion. It was a bit disorienting to watch surfing footage without actually hearing the sounds of surf, but I soon got used to it after a while and the combination of the surfing and the music assumed a kind of balletic grace. Next came a predictably gloomier segment headlined “Alaska and Norway,” shot in the dead of winter where daylight is only an hour and a half long (the titles helpfully explained to us that sunrise in that part of the world begins at 10 a.m. and sunset is at 11:30 a.m.). The filmmakers, whoever they were (only the San Diego and Half Moon Bay sequences had any onscreen credits either to the people who shot them or the ones who appeared), managed to grab all their shots during the 1 ½-hour time window, and the music, Terry Riley’s “‘G’ Song,” provided an appropriately dark and doleful accompaniment. Next came the comic-relief segment of the program, so to speak: “The Wedge” at Newport Beach, California, a set of short, choppy waves virtually nobody seemed to be able to surf without wiping out. Set to two “Presto” finales of quartets by Franz Josef Haydn (Op. 9, no. 3; and Op. 33, no. 2), this footage evoked quite a lot of audience laughter. In fact, the Op. 33, no. 2 finale had one of Haydn’s notorious trick endings in which the audience started applauding after one of the long pauses in the finale – and then the quartet came back for two notes more.

After that came the local footage, photographed by McCracken Films and Joey Taylor Photography; reportedly McCracken and Taylor were in the audience last night and the beginning announcement made it sound like they were going to do a question-and-answer session at the end of the program, but they didn’t. It helped that the locations where this footage was shot – La Jolla, Ocean Beach (only briefly) and Sunset Cliffs off Point Loma – were familiar to me, including some brief spots of surfers slaloming around the columns that hold up the Ocean Beach Pier. Not only is this sort of surfing incredibly dangerous (you can easily hurt or even kill yourself by crashing into the pilings that hold up the pier), the Ocean Beach Pier itself is currently closed to visitors. So far the city of San Diego is holding hearings on what to do about it and whether to try to fix it or tear it down altogether and build heaven knows what to replace it (probably some kind of “multi-use development” with tacky retail on the ground floor and towers of expensive housing above). This gives the footage important historic value, at least! The local footage was accompanied by the last “Presto” movement of the Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, by Mendelssohn. Next came one of the most interesting segments, though I wasn’t able to take notes on the various people credited; it seemed like the filmmaker was either Dave or Dan Healy and he seemed to be out to give each of the surfers on-screen credits, too, as they first appeared. It was called “Mavericks One” and took place at Half Moon Bay, California (though the only film listed on imdb.com even remotely close to that title is something called Sea Rising: Mavericks, written and directed by James Nguyen and scheduled for release in 2025), and though not all the surfers in it were able to surf their waves to completion, enough of them did it was a welcome relief after all the wipeouts in the Newport Beach sequence.

The program ended with some more creative geography, footage that mashed up the Banzai Pipeline in Oahu, Hawai’i with Skeleton Bay in Namibia, of all places. It was nice to see some footage of Hawai’i, where after all surfing was invented (in the early 1920’s by lifeguards not as sport or entertainment, but as a way to get people they’d rescued from drowning back to dry land as soon as possible), but the cutbacks between Hawai’i and Namibia were confusing, at least partly because aside from one Black man, all the spectators seemed to be white. The accompaniment was the “Presto” movement from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet (so called because he based it on a song called “Death and the Maiden” Schubert had written earlier) and it worked pretty well, creating a nicely somber mood despite the ultra-fast movement title. All in all, Sounds and Swells was a quite nice evening, expertly bringing together two sorts of art – classical music and scenes of surfing – into an engaging whole even though it wasn’t quite the sum of its parts. One wonders why the music didn’t have more to do with the ocean: the piece I’d like to have heard is Debussy’s La Mer, probably the most famous piece of classical “surf music” ever written; it’s for a full orchestra but I’m guessing there’s an arrangement out there for string quartet, and if there isn’t the Hausmanns could probably make one!

Killer Fortune Teller (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 14) I gave my husband Charles a choice as to what TV shows we’d watch next: the much-hyped Billy Joel concert special on CBS (featuring his 100th and final show at Madison Square Garden) or two Lifetime movies. Charles surprised me with his choice: he said, “If it was Billy Joel from 30 years ago I’d be interested, but not with his voice as it is now.” (He also said that Billy Joel had been a favorite of his mother’s when he was growing up.) So we watched the two Lifetime movies, Killer Fortune Teller and Trapped by My Sugar Daddy a.k.a. Prisoner of Love. Killer Fortune Teller turned out to be an O.K. melodrama about a brother and sister, Shane (Jonathan Stoddard) and Olivia (Sarah Murphree) Settel, who inherited the multinational Settel Pharmaceuticals company on the death of their father a few months before. It opens with one of those maddening prologues Lifetime and its producers are very big on these days, in which a woman we don’t know is wheeled into a hospital emergency room and, despite their best efforts (including intubating her – i.e., putting her on a ventilator – which happened to me during my health crisis in December 2021), she dies. Then the film flashes forward 20 years and initially focuses on the rivalry between the Settel siblings, and in particular Olivia’s resentment that the company’s board gave Shane the CEO title even though Olivia got better grades in business school and was all-around more qualified, simply because Shane had a dick. Shane is negotiating a big merger deal with a rival drug company whose founding CEO is still very much alive, in charge and determined not to sell.

Because his dad was big into mysticism in general and fortune-tellers and Tarot card readers in particular, Shane decides to check out well-known “intuitive” Arabella Prescott (Avis Wrentmore) – imdb.com lists her first name as “Arabelle” but I’m quite sure what I heard the actors say was “Arabella” – at her roadside Tarot stand. Arabella is not in when Shane arrives, but he’s read by her staff member, Maya Priestley (Natalie Daniels), who handles the Tarot cards herself. (I’ve heard from actual Tarot readers that the person being read is supposed to handle the cards, but Charles said he’s heard of it both ways.) With Maya’s encouragement, Shane pushes through his big deal and, at a dull business party to celebrate it, he “accidentally” runs into Natalie King (Caina Summer Field) when he bumps into her (or she into him) and his drink spills all over her. The two start dating – Natalie introduces herself as a “journalist” even though she’s only a blogger specializing in stories about real estate (she covers something called “Proposition 28,” and while we never quite learn what that is it seems to have something to do with expanding opportunities for affordable housing). Shane tells Natalie he ultimately wants eight children, and Natalie says, “Then we’d better get started on that right away” – though, alas, writer/director Peter Sullivan and his writing colleagues, Jeffrey Schenck and Adam Rockoff (the Usual Suspects in the Johnson Production Group’s films), don’t give us the hot soft-core porn scene between them Danny J. Boyle and Ashley O’Neil did in Secret Life of the Pastor’s Wife.

As the film progresses (like a disease), it becomes more and more apparent to us, if not to the Settels, that Maya Priestley and Natalie King are working together in some sort of criminal scheme, including spiking a drink with poison to dispatch Shane’s assistant Tyler Armstrong (Kenny Resch, who looked so much like Jonathan Stoddard I began to wonder if he was a third Settel sibling) which the police later rule was an “accidental” drug overdose. Olivia is suspicious enough of Natalie King that she grabs a wine glass with her fingerprints on it and gives it to her friend, African-American police detective Rita Halsey (Jessica A. Caesar), to run her prints. Rita tells Olivia that “Natalie King”’s real name is Janice Augustine, and when Olivia passes the information on to Shane he recognizes the last name as that of a family who sued Settel Pharmaceuticals for wrongful death in connection with a woman who died of cancer while on the company’s supposed “miracle drug,” Tranquilify (though sometimes the name is spelled “Traquilify,” without the “n”). Later on we learn that “Maya Priestley” is really Lizzie Augustine, Janice’s sister, and the two women hatched this plot in which one would pose as a Tarot card reader (we eventually learn from Arabella Prescott herself that Maya had been with her only a few months and had not got her licensing credentials from the national Tarot card readers’ association, which made me wonder if there really is such a thing and, if there is, what test do they give aspiring Tarot card readers to prove themselves worthy of a license the way aspiring cosmetologists have to prove themselves by doing haircuts) while the other seduced Shane, got him to marry her, then the two would kill both Shane and Olivia and inherit the Settel Pharmaceuticals fortune. Of course it all works out in the end, and Shane gallantly agrees to resign the CEO position in favor of his more highly qualified sister. Killer Fortune Teller was an O.K. Lifetime movie, not as wildly outrageous or as melodramatic as some I’ve seen but not as genuinely moving as a handful of the others I’ve seen either.

Trapped by My Sugar Daddy, a.k.a. Prisoner of Love (Almost Never Films, RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Much the same could be said of Trapped by My Sugar Daddy, which was originally filmed in 2022 as Prisoner of Love. Like Killer Fortune Teller, Trapped by My Sugar Daddy begins with a mysterious prologue set 20 years before the main story and its connection to the main plot remains defiantly obscure. A young woman is flying on a private plane with a man she thinks is her sugar-daddy boyfriend, but he turns out to be Peter Coleman (Ryan Francis), who overpowers her on the plane, puts a hood over her head, and … Then we cut to the main action, set in Greenwich, Connecticut (Killer Fortune Teller was definitely set in Los Angeles), in which mother Sarah Bragg (Tiffany Montgomery) and her 18-year-old daughter Carly (Katie Kelly, top-billed) are budding interior designers. When the house across the street from theirs is bought by a wealthy 50-something named Kyle Smithford (James Hyde), the Braggs offer themselves for the job as their decorator, insulting rival designer Amanda James (played by Lindsay Hartley, who also directed from a script by Dave Hickey and Casey Bose). Naturally, Kyle has the hots for Carly and vice versa, even though (as she keeps being reminded by her mom and the other characters) he’s old enough to be her father. Incidentally, Carly’s real father, Michael Bragg, is in the dramatis personae and he’s being played by Michael Wagemann, whom I thought was the sexiest actor in the film. It is clear that the three Braggs live together – Michael is not a divorced dad who’s sort-of in her daughter’s life – though it’s not clear what, if anything, Michael does for a living. Carly is attending design school in New York, and her best friend there is a young Black woman named Melanie Bradley (Heather Lynn Harris), nicknamed “Mel.”

At first I thought Hickey and Bose were setting Mel up to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her, but Mel has her own bad boyfriend. He calls himself “Brent Cundey” (Ryan Francis) but he’s really “Peter Coleman” (though neither of those names are his real one), the man whom we saw in the prologue doing whatever was done to that young woman two decades earlier. Midway through the movie a mystery woman crashes Kyle’s home while he and Carly are there making out; she holds a gun on him and threatens to kill him over the mysterious disappearance of her daughter years before. Ultimately we realize that this is the mother of the young woman in the prologue to whom Peter, Brent or whatever his name is did whatever to her; we’ve assumed all along he killed her and dumped her body out of the plane in mid-flight. It turns out that Kyle and “Brent” are high-end human traffickers who specialize in seducing naïve teenage girls who are disaffected with their parents; they romance them for a while and then pack them off in a private plane to their ultimate destinations with rich creeps around the world who want them as permanent sex slaves (or at least until the rich clients tire of them and kill them, which they can do because they’re part of the world’s 0.001 percent and therefore have actual, if not legal, immunity from any criminal or civil prosecution whatsoever). Ultimately Sarah and Michael cotton to what’s going on, and there’s a neat climax in which both grown Braggs rescue Carly and Mel from the clutches of the evil traffickers, including crashing their car into the open gate of Kyle’s plane, thereby disabling it long enough for the police to arrive and arrest Kyle and “Brent.” (Fortunately, this is one Lifetime movie that ends with the villains being arrested instead of dying in a bloodbath.)

There’s a neat tag scene in which Carly is shown deciding to change her college major from interior design to psychiatry because she wants to help other naïve young women avoid being ensnared by older well-to-do scumbags like she was. There are also some other characters, including Carly’s age-peer boyfriend Ben (Hunter Hobbs), who’s appropriately homely and makes it credible that Carly would think she was trading up for an older man who, besides his fortune, looked considerably sexier; and Bob (Ben Richardson), owner of a New York City bar for which Carly and Mel work – apparently there’s a quirk in New York’s liquor laws in which you have to be 21 to drink legally but you can work in a bar at 18. Bob gives Carly a job as a server but it’s obvious (at least to us) that he’s really trying to get into her pants; Carly holds down the job until $600 in cash mysteriously goes missing from his safe. He’s convinced Carly stole it and fires Mel, too, when Mel tries to defend her – of course the real culprits are Ben and two heavy-set thugs who work for him, who stole the money and then framed Carly for the crime. I wish they’d kept the original, more ambiguous title Prisoner of Love for this one, and I kept flashing back to a much better 1949 movie on this same theme, Caught, directed by Max Ophuls and an uncredited John Berry and featuring Barbara Bel Geddes as a naïve young woman who dreams of marrying a rich man; Robert Ryan as the rich man she marries but then finds him pathologically jealous and possessive; and James Mason as the nice young doctor she goes to work for (and falls in love with) once she’s walked out on her husband’s money and stifling environment. I was surprised when I looked up my moviemagg review on Caught and found it oddly lukewarm (it’s on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/03/caught-enterprise-mgm-1949.html), but it’s still a damned sight better than Trapped by My Sugar Daddy a.k.a. Prisoner of Love!

Secret Life of a Pastor's Wife (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 13) Lifetime showed a movie called Secret Life of a Pastor’s Wife, and the title and the Lifetime synopsis (“Angie, the wife of a charismatic pastor who extols family values yet maintains an icy demeanor toward his own, seeks solace from her marital woes in the arms of her recently hired pool boy, a fling which quickly upsets the idyllic façade of the community, reigniting old jealousies, and leaving no one's secrets safe”) had me wondering if writer Ashley O’Neil had based her script on the recent (2020-2022) scandal involving Rev. Jerry Falwell, Jr., his wife and their pool boy, Giancarlo Granda. Granda said he would have sex with Mrs. Falwell while Mr. Falwell watched, and Mr. Falwell said he knew about the affair, stumbled in on them one time and said he was “traumatized” by the sight. O’Neil threw a couple of mild hints in the direction of the alleged Falwell affair (in both senses) but mostly stuck to the Lifetime formula, except for one big surprise twist about 50 minutes into the movie’s running time (including commercials; the reveal would come considerably earlier on a “streaming” viewing without them). In this case, the pastor is Jim Martin (Andrew Fultz), who’s written a book called Learning to Be a Godly Wife and whose sermons are so sex-obsessed I’d forgive his parishioners for wondering if he could ever talk about anything else. His wife is Angie Martin (Jennings Rice, top-billed), and the pool boy is Jason Rich (Mike Manning). Jason has taken over as their pool boy by either buying out or murdering the previous one, Rodney, and taking over his business, “Bottom Feeders” (a name which evokes Ashley O’Neil’s rather obvious sense of irony and cynicism). It’s lust at first sight between Angie and Jason, and before long they’re having at each other in a typically hot soft-core porn scene from director Danny J. Boyle (not the Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, but a capable filmmaker in his own right even though all I’ve seen from him is Lifetime movies and he’s all too faithful to their tropes).

Jim and Angie have a daughter, Leila (whose name is pronounced “LAY-luh,” like the “Layla” in Eric Clapton’s song; my stepgrandmother’s name was Leila, but she pronounced it “LEE-luh”), who turns out [spoiler alert!] biologically to be Angie’s daughter but not Jim’s. Angie conceived Leila during a one-night stand with an anonymous man and Jim offered to marry her and act as a father to her child, but he’s too cold and forbidding to offer much emotional support either to Angie or Leila. Midway through the movie Jason is actually murdered at the motel where he lives, and the story becomes a whodunit with a number of suspects: Jim himself (the police have surveillance footage of him skulking around outside the motel on the night Jason was killed); Jim’s friend Nathan (Nick Checket), who once approached Jim after a sermon and offered to do anything for him in what definitely sounded, at least to me, like a homosexual advance (or was I just reading too much into it after noting the Falwell connection?); Nathan’s wife Desirée (Janet Carter), who’s also having an affair with Jason and who’s writing a manuscript, Peyton Place-style, about the small-town secrets of fictional “Eastbridge” (probably in California, since the license plates on the cars look at least vaguely Californian) where all this takes place; and Angie’s confidante Sarah (Harley Bronwyn), who’s been sort of the voice of reason through all this. My mind was running along two tracks, at least after the character of Angie’s sister Catherine, generally called “Cath” (McKensie Lane), is suddenly introduced two-thirds of the way through. Cath is older than Angie and is – or at least says she is – genuinely perturbed at the way Jim has driven a wedge between her and Angie and forbidden Angie from being in touch with the rest of her family. Part of me was thinking Jim murdered Jason out of jealousy, not only because Jason was having an affair with Angie but because Jim wanted him himself (as I said, I was probably reading way more Gay connections into this story than Ashley O’Neil intended!); part of me was thinking O’Neil was going to make Cath the killer, driven by jealousy and hatred of the ultra-religious Eastbridge community.

The idea that the killings – not only Jason but Desirée, who’s found dead, an apparent suicide from an overdose of Ambien (a prescription-only sleep medication) that it’s been revealed in a previous scene that Jim is taking – are some sort of retribution for the community’s religious hypocrisy is reinforced by the anonymous notes various people in the town have been getting, all handwritten on a two-toned brown card stock with messages about sin and retribution and hints that the writer knows about all the sinning that’s going on in the town, particularly the extra-relational sexual activity. Cath gives Angie an old photo of Jim and Jason together when they were both college students – which seemed like a plot hole to me because Mike Manning looked young enough to be Andrew Fultz’s son and the two did not look like they could have been college students together (although Jim Martin could have gone back to school as an adult to get his divinity degree). There’s a woman in the photo who turns out to be the late Victoria Edgerton. She was the wife of one of Jim’s and Jason’s professors, Matthew Edgerton. She was having affairs with both Jim and Jason simultaneously; Matthew found out about it and supposedly killed her out of jealousy. He was convicted and is still in prison for the crime, but he’s maintained his innocence and it turns out at the end [second spoiler alert!] that Jim killed her and drowned her in the Edgertons’ swimming pool (action we saw at the beginning of the film in a prologue which we didn’t understand because we didn’t know who either of these people were),then killed both Jason and Desirée to cover his tracks. Cath misses a date with Angie at a local bar simply called “BAR” (which reminded me of the similarly named establishment in the 1960 film The Leech Woman, which when it was parodied on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 one of the cast members joked, “Let’s go to BAR, order SANDWICH and have DRINK!”) and she turns out to have been in a car accident.

At least that’s what we think happened to her; later she escapes from the hospital wearing a surgical gown and unplugs her own IV, which had me wondering if she was going to turn out to be the villain after all and had merely been faking that her injuries were worse than they were. But no-o-o-o-o; with the aid of a police detective in another city that also happened to be an ex-boyfriend, Cath had got Jim’s DNA tested from a hair sample Angie had collected for her, and that had matched Jim to the scene of Victoria’s murder. (There’s a brief flashback scene showing Jim actually killing her, in which she’s played by Mackenzie Hughes.) At the end, after Angie has killed Jim in self-defense, she, Cath and their mother (unidentified on imdb.com) reunite and celebrate the reunification of their family. Secret Life of the Pastor’s Wife is one of those frustrating Lifetime films that could have been a good deal better than it is, especially if O’Neil had followed up on the hints she dropped that Jim was actually Bisexual and involved sexually with both Jason and Nathan. Even without going that far, she could have made a stronger story with the material she had if she hadn’t kept falling back on Lifetime clichés to help her out of awkward story situations. O’Neil and director Danny J. Boyle both deserved better than a potentially provocative and exciting story premise that devolves into a not-very-interesting whodunit.