Where No One Can Find Her (Underground Productions, Benattar/Thomas Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Yesterday (Sunday, October 4) I ended up watching an O.K. Lifetime movie called Where No One Can Find Her, directed by Kaila York from a script by Taylor Warren Duff. Kaila York is obviously a woman – there’s a large photo on her imdb.com page and a description that reads, “After several years working at a top talent agency, a studio, and several production companies, Kaila York launched her own production company, Headlong Entertainment, to further the stories she was passionate about telling.” I’m guessing Taylor Warren Duff is a man but I’m not sure about that: their imdb.com page contains no photo or indication of their gender. Where No One Can Find Her is a grim but pretty predictable Lifetime tale in which Izzy (Casey Breneman), daughter of Jamie (Brianna Cohen), is growing up in a single-parent household because her father Craig (Heath Adam Cates) is in prison on a 10-year sentence. (At least Duff, unlike their colleagues on the otherwise far superior A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story, gave us an explanation for why dad wasn’t in the picture.) The film opens with an odd scene in which two no-goodniks, one male and one female, are having an argument about the hooded black masks they’re both wearing and whether donning them for their caper is going too far over the top. Izzy is pulling an all-nighter to cram for advanced placement exams in chemistry and calculus to qualify for admission and a scholarship to Georgia Tech (the entire film takes place in Fayetteville, Arkansas) when the two hooded thugs invade her nice suburban home, drug Jamie into unconsciousness, and kidnap Izzy. The next thing Izzy knows, she’s imprisoned in a wooden box presumably buried underground. The box is equipped with a fan for ventilation and various protein bars so she can eat. It’s also got a TV monitor through which the hooded kidnapper can speak to her and observe her every move. He warns her that any time he wants he can simply turn off the fan, which will mean she will suffocate for lack of air in two hours or so. With an extraordinary level of mental determination and an ingenuity reminiscent of MacGyver (the character is actually name-checked in the script), Izzy takes out a black Sharpie and starts making lists of what resources she has available, what her goals are (both short- and long-term), and her progress towards each one. Among the foodstuffs (if you can call it that) with which her captors equipped her was a pack of chewing gum, with which Izzy plugs the lenses of the surveillance camera monitoring her until her captor orders her to remove it or else have him turn off the fan and let her die.

We later see one of the kidnappers out of the mask, and it turns out to be a tall, leggy woman about Jamie’s age. We learn this because Duff and York actually show her making one of the ransom calls. The ransom demand is $100,000 and Jamie pleads that she’s just a nurse and doesn’t have that kind of money available. Just then Craig, who’s served seven years of a 10-year sentence, is suddenly released from prison. Since Jamie has been so bitter about him she’s never taken any of his phone calls (as I know from personal experience, the only way a prisoner is legally allowed to call someone “outside” is to do so collect), it’s a total surprise to her when he turns up on her doorstep, having won early release (though we’re not sure whether he got time off for good behavior or he was actually paroled). We learn over the course of the movie’s two hours (90 minutes if you don’t count the commercials) that Craig was in prison for being part of a car-theft ring and the night he was arrested there was a shoot-out with the police and Craig’s confederate Lee was fatally shot. The officers the Fayetteville police assign to the case are detectives Stokes (Eric Hanson), a middle-aged frump with a bad attitude; and Conroy (Brian Latimer), a drop-dead gorgeous twink. From the moment Stokes confronts Jamie and starts interrogating her about why she was caught wandering on the streets clearly under the influence of something or other, what it’s really about, and whether Izzy has anything to do with it, Stokes’s attitude is so rotten I immediately suspected that he was the male kidnapper – and [spoiler alert!] I was right. Jamie is at first reluctant to share anything with Stokes or Conroy because the kidnappers warned her, “NO COPS,” by writing those words on her arms with marking pens. Later we learn that Stokes was involved in the shoot-out in which Craig was arrested (on Jamie’s tip, we also learn); that Stokes’s police partner Vance was the one who shot Lee; and Vance got such a bad reputation on the Fayetteville force that he was shunned by his fellow officers, became a hopeless alcoholic and got fired. There are a few scenes showing Jamie’s and Craig’s attempts to raise the $100,000 ransom in cash; including one in which an officious bank official tells her it’s “policy” not to let anyone have more than $10,000 in one transaction even though Jamie had $40,000 on deposit.

Jamie thinks she has the kidnappers talked down from $100,000 to $75,000, and in order to get the last part of that Craig hits on the idea of stealing a 1967 Corvette Sting Ray coupe that was his most prized possession until he turned it over to his cousin Travis just before he started his sentence. There’s a grim scene in which Craig tries to steal the car so he can sell it to his former fence in the old days, only Travis has put a “Claw” anti-theft device on the steering wheel and Craig has no idea how to remove it. (Craig admits to Jamie that his job in the car-theft ring was to hot-wire the stolen cars, but it was Lee who did the breaking-in part before that.) Stokes admits that, despite the massive ransom he and his female partner (whose relationship to him is never specified) demanded, he had no intention of ever letting Izzy go. What he wanted was revenge, particularly the thrill of putting Jamie and Craig through the same pain he went through of having someone they were emotionally committed to die without them being able to do anything to stop it. Ultimately there’s a big confrontation in which Stokes is mortally wounded by a scythe wielded by Craig (the scene is a deserted barn), and he insists to the end that he’s going to take the secret of Izzy’s whereabouts with him – which he does, speeding his own exit by throwing himself through an open window to die on the ground. Meanwhile, Jamie and Craig have figured out how to hack into Izzy’s video feed so that, even though they have no idea where she is, at least they’re in communication with her. Ultimately they hit on the idea of having Izzy rewire her old iPad, with which she was buried, to function as a radio transmitter in the hope that someone can use it to figure out her location. Unfortunately, the only thing Izzy can use as an antenna is the grill from the fan that’s supplying her with air, and without that she will die in two hours unless she’s found in the meantime.

This sets up an exciting suspense climax (exciting enough that Lifetime’s habit of putting their last commercial break in the middle of the denouement was even more annoying than usual) in which Jamie, Craig, and the police led by Conroy (ya remember Conroy?) race to find Izzy’s burying place before she croaks. Needless to say, York and Goff delay the resolution as long as possible and Conroy finds Izzy’s box at the very last moment. It ends with a tag scene in which Craig and Jamie see Izzy off to college at Georgia Tech and Craig acknowledges that during his prison years he took up with a woman named Erin and plans to be with her – leading to the ironic ending that the man who was imprisoned for seven years has a partner and the woman who raised their daughter in the meantime doesn’t. Where No One Can Find Her is pretty typical Lifetime fare, though at least dad being in prison is a somewhat different way of explaining why the heroine has to raise her daughter as a single parent (usually dad is either divorced and remarried, often settled with his new wife in another state and unintereted in his prior family, or dead) and I liked Izzy’s MacGyver-esque resourcefulness; she’s not just another Lifetime “pussy in peril.”

A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story (Studio TF1 America, Novus, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 3) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story, based on a true-life murder case in Maryland near Washington, D.C. in the early 2020’s. The victim was a young woman named Sarah Harris (Siobhan Williams) and her killer was her doctor turned employer turned boyfriend, Dr. James Ryan (Luke Macfarlane, who’d previously played a hot stud turned killer in a 2023 Lifetime true-crime movie called Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story, which I reviewed for the moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/amish-stud-eli-weaver-story-milojo.html). Dr. Ryan was a specialist in what’s called “oral and maxillofacial surgery” (the word “maxillofacial” has long confused me; the Cleveland Clinic Web site says it “refers to operations on your mouth, jaws, neck or face” and it’s a specialty within dentistry), and Sarah Harris was a woman in her early 20’s who was living with her mother Tina and older sister Rachel, went in to see Dr. Ryan to have her wisdom teeth removed. (Neither of the actresses playing Tina or Rachel are yet identified on imdb.com, more’s the pity because they’re the two strongest players in the film.) Director Siobhan Devine (I can remember when the first name “Siobhan” was so weird it was worth notice, but here’s a film in which both the director and the female lead are Siobhans) subtly hints that Dr. Ryan’s interest in Sarah is more than professional by having him stroke the side of her face. Dr. Ryan, who in real life was twice Sarah’s age and already had three children by a previous wife before their divorce, already has a woman assistant but decides he needs another one. He invites Sarah to apply despite her lack of any relevant experience, and within a week he’s taking her out on dates, inviting her to his home, and romancing her in every way he can. Mom Tina is put out by this, especially since Sarah already has an age-peer boyfriend named Sean (whom we don’t meet until the very end of the film, after Sarah is already dead), but it’s clear mom likes him a lot better than Sarah does and Sarah breaks up with him to be with Dr. Ryan.

Midway through the story Sarah enters and wins a “Miss Maryland Petite Pageant” beauty contest in 2020 (though according to an Arts & Entertainment article on the actual events surrounding the case, at https://www.aetv.com/articles/sarah-harris-james-ryan-dentist-drugs, that was also the year she met Dr. Ryan). Actually Dr. Ryan had been stalking her earlier; at 15 he’d regularly eaten at a local pizza restaurant where she was working as a server, and deliberately sat in her section whenever possible so she would wait on him. (This sounds an awful lot like Lolita and Humbert Humbert to me.) Within weeks of their getting involved, Sarah started confessing her mental issues to Dr. Ryan, notably anxiety and difficulty sleeping, and he began raiding his medical cabinet for controlled substances including diazepam, ketamine, and propofol. (I remember going in for surgery and being told that the anesthetic they would use on me would be propofol. I immediately thought, “Oh, shit; that’s the stuff that killed Michael Jackson.”) Dr. Ryan would feed her these substances not only orally but intravenously, and within months of her moving in with him their home looked like the scene of a wild drug party even though it was just the two of them. Mom Tina and sister Rachel, who had her own mental issues – Rachel’s boyfriend had killed himself in front of her – went to see Sarah and saw the condition of her home. They took her home despite her reluctance to go with them. Rachel also used her smartphone to take a video of the scene and various still pictures of all the drugs Dr. Ryan was giving Sarah, making sure that the labels identifying what they were were clearly in the shot. At one point Dr. Ryan invited all three Harrises to join him on a vacation in Florida, but Sarah was so far gone into the drugs Dr. Ryan had put her on she spent virtually all the vacation in her hotel room, mostly sleeping or whining about how she didn’t want to go out in the sun. There was another Harris child, son Chris, who’d moved to Montana and periodically contacted them by phone but declined their invitations for him to come visit them. (When I saw Chris I assumed at first that he was Rachel’s and Sarah’s father until the dialogue clarified their true relationship. The father’s name was Mark, but it’s not clear either from Barbara Marshall’s script or the A&E article cited above what had happened between him and Tina or whether they had divorced or he’d died.)

Unfortunately, Chris dies in Montana of a sudden heart attack and so Tina has the uncomfortable experience of having to bury one of her children even before Dr. Ryan’s antics with Sarah cause her to croak, too. Tina and Rachel manage to get Sarah out of Dr. Ryan’s clutches, get her off the drugs and nurse her back to health, but Dr. Ryan tricks her into returning to him by threatening to commit suicide if she doesn’t. It all ends on January 26, 2022, when Dr. Ryan calls 911 to report that his girlfriend Sarah Harris has had a drug overdose. Tina and Rachel go to Sarah’s home and insist to the police detective on the scene, Ian Iacovello, that Dr. Ryan was responsible for Sarah’s death. Iacovello initially blows it off by saying that he needs “proof” that Sarah’s death wasn’t just the accidental overdose of a long-time addict. While Rachel still has the photos of Dr. Ryan’s drugs on her phone, she and Tina realize they need more evidence and find it on Sarah’s old laptop, which Dr. Ryan had thrown in the trash. Tina and Rachel recover it and then have to guess Sarah’s password, which turns out to be “WINSTON2000” – Winston being a rather homely black dog Tina and Rachel had bought Sarah hoping that having a pet would help bring her back to normality. Rachel opens Sarah’s computer and prints out 200 pages of text messages between Sarah and Dr. Ryan that prove he was distributing drugs to her illegally. Iacovello carefully questions Rachel and Tina to make sure they didn’t break the law themselves in collecting the evidence against Dr. Ryan. They assure him that the first time they entered the home Sarah herself had let them in, and the second time (after the O.D.) they’d used a key Dr. Ryan had given them and grabbed the laptop from the trash outside the house. Accordingly the police arrest Dr. Ryan. For a moment I was expecting Barbara Marshall would have them make the arrest at Sarah’s funeral (where we finally get to meet Sean, the age-peer boyfriend Sarah dumped for Dr. Ryan) in classic Law and Order style, but instead they take Dr. Ryan into custody at his dental office, which is almost as embarrassing. He was charged under a rarely used legal statute called “depraved-heart homicide,” which meant that the prosecution didn’t have to prove that Dr. Ryan deliberately killed Sarah, just that he provided her with drugs that could have killed her and ultimately did. “We have to prove that he did it with reckless disregard for the value of her life,” prosecutor Jennifer Harrison told 48 Hours for their true-crime episode on the case. A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story was a better-than-average Lifetime movie, but I missed any explanation for why the relationship between Dr. Ryan and Sarah lasted as long as it did. Why did Sarah stay with Dr. Ryan so long, and what did Dr. Ryan get out of a relationship with a woman whom he was literally drugging into a stupor? I kept wishing Barbara Marshall had attempted to explain those troublesome aspects of the case, and without those insights A Doctor to Die For was a powerful story but one that could have been better with more thought in the writing.

The Women (Picturehouse, Scion Films, Inferno Distribution, Jagged Films, New Line Cinema, Shukovsky English Entertainment, Ultimate Media Group, 2008)

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

Last night (Friday, October 2) my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d been curious about since I first learned about it while researching the 1939 film The Women, directed by George Cukor and written by Jane Murfin and Anita Loos (they were credited in reverse order but that’s not the sequence in which they worked), for a previous blog post on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-women-max-gordon-plays-and-pictures.html). The film was a 2008 remake of The Women written and directed by Diane English after a 15-year struggle to get it green-lighted. Diane English actually took up the project in 1993 during a hiatus on her hit TV series Murphy Brown and got nibbles from Sony Pictures Studios (nèe Columbia). English first got stars Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts interested in it, but those plans fell through apparently because they both wanted to play the same character. English was unable to get the film made for a major studio and ended up doing it independently through a company called Jagged Films owned by singer Mick Jagger. How the man who co-wrote such sexist songs as “Under My Thumb” ended up bankrolling a feminist movie seems a bit of a stretch, but he did. English originally marketed the film to director James L. Brooks (which would have been a snooze-fest; the late John Gabrish and I watched Brooks’s most famous film, Terms of Endearment, together and joked it should have been called Terms of Emborement), but when he bailed on the project English decided to direct it herself. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, “She wanted to present a version in which the female characters were strong and self-reliant and supported and defended each other rather than resort to treachery and catty remarks to achieve their goals.” If that was her intent, she certainly succeeded. The 2008 The Women got savaged by most of the critics but actually did decently at the box office, grossing $50 million on a budget of $16 million. After a large number of actresses had cycled in and out of the project, including Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Uma Thurman, Whitney Houston, and Queen Latifah, Meg Ryan finally ended up with the leading role after all.

She plays Mary Haines, wife of financier Stephen Haines, who as in Clare Boothe’s original 1936 play and the 1939 film (in which she was played by Irving Thalberg’s widow, Norma Shearer) learns from a gabby manicurist, Tanya (Debi Mazar), that Stephen is having an affair with Crystal Allen (Eva Mendes here, Joan Crawford in 1939), a perfume salesgirl at Saks Fifth Avenue. (Saks is referenced so often in the dialogue that one critic called the 2008 The Women an infomercial.) Mary’s mother Catherine (Candice Bergen) tells her to ignore it, pointing out that her father had an extra-relational affair of his own, she learned about it, ignored it, and eventually it ended and they moved on and stayed together. But Our Mary can’t stand the thought of living with, and even worse sleeping in the same bed with, a man who’s getting his ashes hauled by someone else. She throws him out of the house and visits a lawyer to prepare to sue him for divorce. One of the reasons I was interested in watching the 2008 The Women after I’d caught the 1939 version on TCM recently was to see how Diane English had adapted Boothe’s story and the Murfin/Loos script to the very different social realities of our time. In 1939 it was expected that women, especially women at the upper-middle to upper-class level of the characters in this story, would retire from the workforce once they got married and let their husbands support them. (A frequent plot line in 1930’s movies is of the poor but honest couple who want to get married but can’t because they can’t live and support themselves on just the man’s income.) Today it’s taken for granted that women who get married can still continue to work; Mary Haines is a designer for her father’s clothing company and Sylvie Fowler (Annette Bening; she was called “Sylvia” in the 1939 version and was played by Rosalind Russell) is the editor of a fashion magazine called Cachet, a rival to the real-life Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Sylvie is trying to upgrade Cachet by getting “name” writers to contribute to it, including Bailey Smith (Carrie Fisher), who had quit the fashion mags for a regular gig at The New Yorker until Sylvie tricks her into writing for Cachet by confirming that Mary Haines’s marriage is indeed on the rocks.

The closest thing the 2008 The Women has to a comic relief character is Edie Cohen (Debra Messing), who’s on her fifth pregnancy and announces to her friends that she’s going to keep cranking out kids until one of them is a boy, since her previous four have all been girls. There’s one added character, Alex Fisher (Jada Pinkett Smith), a Black Lesbian who published a book of social-comment essays six years previously but has been beset by writer’s block ever since. Alex shows up on the scene with her girlfriend de jour, a punkish white woman named Natasha (Natasha Alam), and preaches the joy of the same-sex-loving lifestyle to all her friends who are constantly complaining about their struggles with men. One plot element from the original that English had to eliminate is the whole story arc about the women having to move to Reno, Nevada to get their divorces. In the 1930’s many states, including New York (where the characters of The Women live), required proof of wrongdoing, usually adultery, to grant a divorce. So Nevada marketed itself as a divorce mecca in which you could end your marriage as long as you lived there for at least six weeks and made some effort to make it look like you were permanently relocating there. Today, with no-fault divorce a regularly accepted fact of life throughout the U.S., the business of having to go to Reno to end your marriage obviously wouldn’t work as a plot element, though English threw in something similar. Instead of a dude ranch, she put in a New Age treatment and therapy camp in which the women take canoe rides at 5 a.m. She even got Cloris Leachman to play the Führerin of this establishment in as close as she was going to get to Marjorie Main’s terrific performance as the dude-ranch proprietress in the 1939 version. Ironically, the 2008 The Women ended the way Charles had said, when we watched at least part of the 1939 film together (he came home from work midway through), that one would have. Mary Haines, fired by her own father from his clothing company, decides to strike out on her own and launch her own boutique fashion house. She gets her capital from her mom, who’s been sitting on a nest egg for years and offers it to her daughter to start a business of her own.

Mary also learns via her daughter Molly (India Ennenga) that Stephen and Crystal are living together but in a really tiny apartment and Crystal is spending much of her time in the bathtub talking to people on the phone. Molly is disillusioned with her mom for breaking up with her dad, and she gravitates to Sylvie for emotional support – even though Mary is very upset with Sylvie for having let the world know that she and Stephen had broken up. (It even appeared in the infamous Page Six column in the New York Post, which like a lot of the real establishments featured in this movie got an acknowledgment in the credits.) Nonetheless, there’s a great scene in which Molly confronts Crystal in the bathtub (ironically, in the Code-era 1939 film it’s made clear that Crystal is calling real or potential alternate boyfriends in the bathroom, while it’s not all that clear whom she’s talking to in this one – and as Charles pointed out, it took a lot more work in 1939 than it did in 2008 to have your bathroom outfitted with an extension phone, let alone a second line!), Crystal demands that Molly call her “Aunt Crystal,” and Molly not only refuses but tells her point-blank, “I don’t like you.” The film ends with Mary’s triumphal fashion show (ironically the 1939 film also contained a fashion-show sequence, though it had nothing to do with the main plot, didn’t feature any of the principals, and was apparently stuck in over the protests of director George Cukor just so they could advertise a Technicolor sequence in an otherwise all black-and-white movie), which is such a hit she gets an offer from a representative of Saks Fifth Avenue to merchandise her clothes there. Instead of jumping at the chance, Mary holds off because she’s scared of the challenge of manufacturing clothes at the scale Saks would need to sell them, and she gives them a wait-and-see attitude. She also receives a letter from Stephen asking her for a date and enclosing the engagement ring she gave back to him the night they broke up and she threw him out. I found myself mentally remixing the ending so that Stephen and Mary would end up as both professional and personal partners, since with his Wall Street expertise he could presumably find her the capital she’d need to expand her operation and produce enough clothes to fill the needs of Saks (and presumably the other big chain stores who’d also want to sell her line).

There’s also a party to celebrate the debut of Sylvie’s new magazine, Sylvie – like Mary, Sylvie responded to being fired from her family’s business by starting one of her own – and an amusing climax in a hospital maternity ward after Edie Cohen’s water breaks and she’s suddenly about to give birth. The other women race to get her there and ultimately, after an extremely stressful delivery, the baby is born and it’s the long-awaited boy. He's the first male character we’ve seen in the film because, like Clare Boothe and George Cukor, Diane English was careful to keep the all-female casting intact. She even made sure that all the extras and bit players on screen were female. (The published literature on the 1939 film says that Cukor was so into the gynocentrism of the material he insisted that all the animals in the film be female and all the books on the various characters’ bookshelves be by women authors.) English also threw in another Page Six reference that at least hints that Crystal Allen changed sexual orientations and ended up with Alex Fisher’s ex Natasha (though I didn’t believe that for a moment, if only because Crystal had been drawn as so relentless a gold-digger that if she ended up in a Lesbian relationship, it would be with a far more well-to-do woman than Natasha). There’s an ironic line early on in which one of the women says to another, “I feel like I’m in a 1930’s movie” – and both Charles and I joked, “You are.” But I’m quite glad I caught up with the 2008 The Women and give Diane English a lot of credit for thinking through her adaptation and making this story work in a contemporary setting while retaining its original values. English’s imdb.com page contains a quote from her: “I was determined to get The Women done because I wanted to see our great A-list actresses working together as an ensemble – the way they did in the original 1939 version. I was told over and over that it could never be done. But we did it.” The other quote from English on the page is about her overall orientation as a filmmaker: “My work tends to have social or political undertones. I like to tell a smallish story that plays out against a bigger picture, and I find that a woman’s point of view in the world is not very well represented. They say write what you know, and I believe that.” Unfortunately, The Women appears to be Diane English’s only feature-film credit as a director (her imdb.com page lists her as a writer and producer but not director), a real pity because she showed a flair as a filmmaker for telling a story that honors women without too much male-bashing (only what we deserve).

The Honeymoon Killers (Roxanne, Cinerama Releasing, filmed 1968, copyrighted 1969, released 1970)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 1) I watched an interesting if somewhat frustrating film on Turner Classic Movies: The Honeymoon Killers, made in 1968, released in 1970, and produced, directed and written by Leonard Kastle, whose only film it was. Though someone else, Warren Steibel, is credited as producer (Steibel’s friend Leon Levy put up the money), Kastle functioned as producer as well as writer. He didn’t start out as the director: he hired a young man, a recent graduate of the New York University Film School named Martin Scorsese, who’d already has his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, accepted by the Chicago Film Festival in 1967. But Scorsese only lasted one week, apparently because Kastle was upset that Scorsese was shooting the film entirely in master shots and not adding close-ups. Kastle’s first replacement director, Donald Volkman, lasted two weeks before Kastle fired him and took over the directorial reins himself. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Kastle intended The Honeymoon Killers as an answer movie to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, produced by and starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn. Apparently Kastle didn’t like Bonnie and Clyde because it was in vivid color and depicted two real-life outlaws, Clyde Barrow (Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), as glamorous, attractive people. Though the contrast between the glamor Beatty and Dunaway projected in the parts and the evil things they did was a major part of that film’s commercial success – 1960’s audiences loved the irony – Kastle decided to make his own movie about a real-life criminal couple but to shoot it in black-and-white and make it as grungy and unglamorous as possible. The real-life criminal couple he chose were Raymond Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) and Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler). Beck was a heavy-set nurse working in Mobile, Alabama whose roommate Bunny (Doris Roberts) enrolled her in a lonely-hearts club (the 1940’s equivalent of Internet dating) in 1947. Fernandez, a con artist based in New York City who made his living by romancing lonely women and stealing their money, answered her ad. At least in the movie, Fernandez originally intended Martha to be just another swindling victim, but after he absconded with her savings and went back to New York, she called him and said that if he didn’t return to her, she would kill herself. He did, and the two began a torrid affair.

Beck became Fernandez’s partner in crime and soon they began trolling the country looking for other victims, with Martha posing as Fernandez’s brother and sitting in the back seat of their car. When one of their victims threatened to report them to the police, Martha put her on a bus and gave her some pills, allegedly to make her sleep but really to kill her. In one of the film’s most chilling scenes, she loses consciousness on the bus but no one notices her until the bus arrives at its destination. When the driver and the crew of the bus company notice that she hasn’t got off with the other passengers, they inspect her and soon realize she’s dead. Among the victims we see are Doris Acker (Ann Harris) and Janet Fay (Mary Jane Higby), a 60-something widow who attracts Ray and Martha’s attention with a photo she sent them from 20 years earlier. (So “catfishing” was already a “thing” even in the late 1940’s!) In the movie, the two get caught when Martha rats them out to the police (in real life, the cops were investigating the disappearance of Delphine Downing, played in the film by Kip McArdle, and arrested Fernandez and Beck when they returned to the Downing home after an evening at the movies), and there’s a closing scene showing Martha in prison reading a letter from Ray assuring her that she’s the only woman he ever loved. Then there’s a final credit announcing that the real-life Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on March 8, 1951. The use of the actual date is something of a surprise since the visual “look” of the film, particularly the cars and the record albums in one scene, is that of the late 1960’s, and I assumed that Kastle had deliberately updated the story rather than try to do a period piece on a tiny budget. (The scene with the records features the iconic cover of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, released in 1965.)

Warren Steibel, who came to the project after having produced the PBS talk show Firing Line hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr., was quoted as saying, “We wanted to do an honest movie about murders. These are not charming people. They are sleazy people – but fascinating. You won't come out of the theatre feeling sorry for the killers like in some movies. It is not romanticized.” Unfortunately, if that was his and Kastle’s intent, they overdid it big-time by making Fernandez’s and Beck’s victims relentlessly obnoxious and unsympathetic, too. Until the scenes with Delphine Downing and her five-year-old daughter Rainelle (Mary Breen), we don’t meet any would-be victims we actually like and want to see survive, and I was disappointed that Kastle didn’t rejigger his script to allow those two to live. It also doesn’t help that the total budget was $150,000 and that this didn’t allow them to do much in the way of special effects. For the scene in which Martha attacks Janet Fay with a hammer, according to a participant quoted on the film’s Wikipedia page, “condoms containing glycerine and red dye were affixed to the head of the victim with plaster of Paris. The hammer, a balsa-wood prop, had a pin at the end. When the pin pricked the condoms, the blood began to flow.” Even so, Shirley Stoler pulled her punches so much her attacks on Mary Jane Higby (she hits her with the hammer twice) looked more like love-taps than lethal assaults. Ironically, François Truffaut, who’d been one of the directors originally considered for Bonnie and Clyde (producer Beatty offered it to both Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard before they turned it down and he hired Penn), called The Honeymoon Killers his all-time favorite American film. But one gets the impression that there’s a much more interesting movie in the Ray Fernandez/Martha Beck murder story than the one we got here (the Wikipedia page on the real killers lists no fewer than three subsequent feature films and two TV-series episodes on the case). The film I was most reminded of was Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which ironically he was shooting while the real Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck were killing people. I’ve written about Monsieur Verdoux before at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/monsieur-verdoux-charles-chaplin.html, and though it’s a film with its own set of problems, including a mordant script by Chaplin himself that makes his psycho who murders women for their money almost lovable, it’s a damned sight better than The Honeymoon Killers.

Two "Tiffany Color Symphonies": "The Enchanted Forest" (Tiffany, Colorart,1930) and "The Cossack's Bride" (Tiffany, Colorart, 1929)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 1) my husband Charles and I watched two oddball shorts on YouTube, both billed as “A Tiffany Color Symphony,” co-produced by Tiffany and a short-lived studio startup called Colorart. Both of those companies had the ill timing to begin operations in 1929 just as the stock market crashed and the Great Depression hit. Colorart went out of business in late 1929 and Tiffany followed three years later. Colorart, as its name suggests, intended to make all its films in color, using the two-strip Technicolor process which has been unreasonably dissed for years but which I quite like. It’s true it had one major weakness – it could not photograph blue, though it could approach it (in two-strip films with outdoor sequences, the sky frequently registered beige and the sea was teal) – but at its best (and most well preserved), it had a harmonious, painterly elegance that was often lost in the shrieking hues of the three-strip process that replaced it in the early 1930’s. Alas, though the two shorts Charles and I watched last night, The Enchanted Forest (not to be confused with the 1945 feature of that title or one from 1987) and The Cossack’s Bride, turned out (despite the preservation credits to a site called “The Vitaphone Soundtrack Project”) to be silent films with intertitles giving both narrative and dialogue. They were accompanied with Vitaphone records made at the time of production, and The Cossack’s Bride got a major lift when it featured two songs supposedly sung by one of the actors in the film. One I didn’t recognize but the other was the overly familiar “Otchi-Tchorniye” (but then again you could easily get the impression that there was a law in the U.S. requiring that every film that took place in Russia had to have either “Otchi-Tchorniye” or “The Volga Boatmen” in it).

The Enchanted Forest is about a young girl (Virginia Marshall, the only credited actor on imdb.com) who’s being bossed around by an unsympathetic nanny while her parents attend a round of parties (none of which we actually see) and she complains how much she misses her mother. Out of sheer desperation and boredom she escapes to the titular enchanted forest, actually a garden surrounding the mansion where her parents live, and we see a mysterious figure in the background. We’re not sure at first whether he’s a normal person or some sort of leprechaun or elf, but as director Martin Justice and cinematographers Allen M. Davey and Ray Rennahan (the latter supplied not by Tiffany or Colorart, but by Technicolor; one of Technicolor’s conditions for being able to use their process was sending out their own cameraman, either to work as “color consultant” with the studio’s own cinematographer or to shoot the entire film himself) get closer we see he’s considerably shorter than Virginia Marshall. He’s also outfitted with pointy ears and he escorts her to a clearing where a whole bunch of elves are ready to throw her a party of their own, including a marvelous scene in which we hear a xylophone on the soundtrack while some of the elves are hitting giant mushrooms in what Charles jokingly called a “fungiphone.” Meanwhile Virginia’s real mother notices she’s gone and is understandably freaked out about it, expressing her guilt feelings to Virginia’s dad and going out into the garden to look for her. Needless to say, by the time Virginia’s mom finds her all the elves have disappeared, but she rescues the poor girl who’s fallen asleep in the woods, takes her home, and seems quite a bit more solicitous about her than she’d been earlier, when she’d abruptly and callously brushed off Our Heroine as she was on her way to another party. The Vitaphone Soundtrack Project presented this as an example of 1930 special effects, but showing people in dramatically different size ratios was actually a pretty common trick at the time; one recalls the remarkable scene in the 1930 feature musical King of Jazz in which Paul Whiteman in normal scale brings out a satchel which he announces contains his entire band … in miniature size.

The Cossack’s Bride has a few interesting names in the production staff: the director is Aubrey Scotto, who spent most of the early 1930’s making “band shorts” (the 10-minute one-reelers that were essentially the music videos of the time) and Rudolph C. Flothow, credited as “supervising producer,” later went on to make serials at Columbia, including the 1943 Batman (the character’s first live-action appearance and an unusually well-done chapter play). The plot of The Cossack’s Bride is pretty simple: one Cossack leader (Christian J. Frank) has kidnapped the wife (Lucille Powers) of another (Gregory Gaye, who two years later would play a star director in Universal’s 1932 film of the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart Hollywood spoof Once in a Lifetime) and repeatedly tries to rape her. Needless to say, she’s not a happy camper about this. Her husband and his sidekick (presumably Joseph Marievsky), who with his long hair and full bears looks more credible as a Cossack than the other two, hit on an idea to get her back. They’ll disguise themselves as traveling musicians, crash the bad Cossack leader’s party, drink the bad Cossacks under the table and re-abduct the Cossack’s bride. Thanks to a weird bet the good Cossack leader makes with the bad Cossack leader that the good Cossacks will keep singing while the bad Cossacks will keep drinking and the bet is over who will have to stop first – the good Cossacks by running out of songs or the bad Cossacks by running out of consciousness – the ploy works and the good Cossack leader gets his bride back at the end. Neither of these Tiffany/Colorart co-productions are great, or even particularly good, movies, but they’ve been reasonably well restored and it’s nice to see examples of two-strip Technicolor at or close to its best preserved.

Some Like It Hot (Ashton Productions, The Mirisch Corporation, United Artists, 1959)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, September 26) my husband Charles and I watched what amounted to a Billy Wilder double feature on Turner Classic Movies even though that’s not really what the TCM programmers intended. The first film on our program was the 1959 drag comedy Some Like It Hot, which they were showing as the second half of a double feature that also included the original 1978 French version of La Cage aux Folles even though the movies have virtually nothing in common other than they both feature men dressed as women. Some Like It Hot actually began life in 1935 as a French film called Fanfare of Love about a pair of struggling male musicians who adopt various disguises to get jobs. They dress as Hungarians to get jobs in a Gypsy band; they do blackface to get jobs in a Black band; and they dress as women to get jobs in an all-woman band. Robert Thoeren, expatriate German director who in 1933 – just before the Nazis took power, which counts as one of the worst bits of timing in film history – had just made Viktor und Viktoria, about a woman who joins a troupe of female impersonators and has to pretend to be a man pretending to be a woman, wrote the script along with Michael Logan (who like Thoeren got writing credit on Some Like It Hot) along with Pierre Prévert and René Pulpi (who didn’t). In 1958 Billy Wilder had the idea to do a remake but eliminate all the other disguises to focus on the leads playing two men who have to dress and pose as women. Wilder’s original casting for the film was Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as the cross-dressing male leads and Mitzi Gaynor as Sugar Kane, the band’s ukulele player and singer whom they both fall for. But when Wilder made that proposal to United Artists, they turned his cast down because none of the suggested leads had enough star power to carry a film. The UA “suits” said they’d finance the film if Wilder could get a more important male – Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis – for one of the leads. Wilder actually made an appointment with Sinatra to discuss the role, but Sinatra never showed up. (When La Cage aux Folles was remade in the U.S. in 1996 as The Birdcage, Sinatra was once again offered the male lead and flaked out of the meeting to discuss it.) Then Wilder got a call from Arthur Miller, the prestigious playwright who was then married to Marilyn Monroe. Miller told Wilder that Monroe had just suffered a miscarriage and needed a job immediately to get her mind off the tragedy of losing her baby. (Monroe would get pregnant again during Some Like It Hot and would once again have a miscarriage; later Monroe biographers have guessed that she couldn’t bring a pregnancy to term because she’d had too many illegal abortions during her starlet days and they’d torn up her insides.) Wilder suggested Some Like It Hot even though he’d already had a hard time working with Marilyn on their previous film together, The Seven-Year Itch (1955). Marilyn ran with it and so did the “suits” at United Artists, who told Wilder that she was such a big star that if he could get her to play Sugar Kane he could cast the two men with whomever he wanted.

Wilder and his screenwriting colleague, Isidor “I.A.L.” Diamond (the initials stood for “Interscholastic Algebra League,” in which Diamond had been a champion during his high-school days), at first were going to set Some Like It Hot in contemporary times but then decided to make it a period piece because with an old-time setting all the clothes would look a bit “off” to modern audiences. Wilder and Diamond brainstormed when they should have the film take place and finally decided on 1929 because they wanted the male leads to be in such imminent peril for their lives that they wouldn’t dare doff their drags even when they were both attracted to the woman. As Wilder explained to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse (1969), “A lot of people wondered why we used the St. Valentine’s Day massacre to start the picture. But we had to have something really powerful to force the boys to pretend to be girls, and to make it rational that, even if they were in love with Marilyn, they wouldn’t take off their clothes and say, ‘Look, I’m a man!’ So the fact that they’re threatened with machine guns supplied the reason.” The gimmick is that bassist Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and Joe (Tony Curtis) happen upon the St. Valentine’s Day massacre while in a garage to pick up a car belonging to Dolores (Beverly Wills), their agent’s secretary, to drive to a gig in Urbana. They watch gangster Spats Columbo (George Raft) and his hit people (including the great Mike Mazurki from the cast of Murder, My Sweet) rub out the rival gang of “Toothpick” Charlie (George E. Stone), only they’re noticed by the gang and flee for their lives, though not before the gangsters’ bullets carve four telltale holes in the front of Jerry’s bass. (Ironically, when the film Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967, many critics questioned the rapid alternation between violence and slapstick comedy. Actually Buster Keaton had done that in his 1926 masterpiece The General, but I’ve often wondered why the critics who didn’t like Bonnie and Clyde had seemingly forgot about Some Like It Hot, which had mixed comedy and violence just eight years earlier.) They plead with their agent, Sig Poliakoff (Billy Gray), for a job, preferably out of town, but the only gig available for a saxophonist and a bass player is with “Sweet Sue (Joan Shawlee) and Her Society Syncopators.” The drag musicians – Joe calling himself “Josephine” and Jerry using the name “Daphne” after he rejects “Geraldine” – join the train carrying Sweet Sue and her band to the Seminole-Ritz Hotel in Florida, “played” by the real-life Hotel del Coronado off the coast of San Diego. (A number of imdb.com commentators have noted that the shadows in the movie are falling in the wrong direction for an East Coast location.)

Along the way they meet Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), whose real name is “Sugar Kowalczyk,” and claim to be graduates of the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music. (I once watched Some Like It Hot with my late partner John Gabrish, who’d grown up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and he assured me that no such institution existed.) Sugar announces that she’s hoping to land a millionaire sugar daddy in Florida, and obligingly Joe a.k.a. Josephine disguises himself as the heir to the Shell Oil fortune (an anachronism since there were no Shell gas stations in the U.S. until 1932) and, speaking with the voice of Cary Grant (whose first feature film, This Is the Night, was not made until 1932), invites Sugar to “his” yacht for an evening dinner and … The yacht is actually the property of Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), who’s fallen hard for Daphne and takes him on a date that includes dinner and dancing to a Cuban band. When “Daphne” and “Josephine” get together, Daphne announces that Osgood has proposed to him and he’s seriously considering his offer. “Why would a guy want to marry a guy?” asks “Josephine,” to which the besotted Daphne answers, “Security!” (Joe E. Brown has an unusual connection with Marilyn Monroe. Born Norma Jeane Baker, Monroe got her screen name from Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox talent scout who signed her to a studio contract in 1946. Lyon had been an actor who’d appeared with Ziegfeld stage star Marilyn Miller in the 1931 film Her Majesty, Love, and got the idea of calling Norma Jeane “Marilyn” from Marilyn Miller. Joe E. Brown had been in Marilyn Miller’s first film, the 1929 musical Sunny, and to my knowledge is the only performer who worked with both Marilyn Miller and Marilyn Monroe.) All seems to be going acceptably until Spats Columbo shows up to attend a gangsters’ convention under the cover identity “Friends of Italian Opera.” (According to Ovid Demaris, who wrote a number of true-crime books about the Mafia, this was inspired by a real-life speakeasy in Chicago in the 1920’s in which the waiters took turns singing operatic arias; Billy Wilder knew about this and decided to insert an in-joke by using “Friends of Italian Opera” as the front for his meeting of Mafiosi.)

Among the attendees is Johnny Paradise (Edward G. Robinson, Jr.), who’s ostensibly a member of Spats’s gang – he’s even shown flipping a coin the way George Raft did in his star-making role in the 1932 Scarface, and when Raft sees him do it he snarls, “Where’d ya learn that cheap trick?” – but really is the hit man hired by the head of the “Friends of Italian Opera,” “Little Bonaparte” (Nehemiah Persoff), to rub out Spats Columbo as revenge for Spats having killed “Toothpick” Charlie. Once again “Josephine” and “Daphne” are fleeing for their lives, with the four holes in “Daphne”’s bass giving them away as the two musicians who’ve now witnessed two major mob hits, though a federal agent (Pat O’Brien) is on hand to arrest the gangsters behind the hit on Spats. Our Heroes/Heroines find themselves fleeing in Osgood’s boat with Osgood and Sugar. Sugar pairs off with Joe even after she learns that he’s not only broke but also a saxophone player (she’s had bad experiences with saxophonists before), while in an audacious scene that still packs a punch even now, “Daphne” pleads with Osgood that they can’t get married. “Well, in the first place, I'm not a natural blonde,” “Daphne” protests. “Doesn't matter,” Osgood says. “I smoke! I smoke all the time!” “Daphne” says (a gag reference to a previous line in which Osgood had told “her” that his mother had objected to him marrying a woman who smoked). “I don't care,” Osgood says. “Well, I have a terrible past,” “Daphne” says. “For three years now, I've been living with a saxophone player.” “I forgive you,” Osgood replies. Then “Daphne” says, tragically, “I can never have children!” Osgood says, “We can adopt some.” Then “Daphne” pulls off his wig and says, “But you don't understand, Osgood! Ohh,” reverting to his normal Jerry voice, “I'm a man!” Osgood shrugs and says, “Well, nobody's perfect!” There are varying accounts as to how that line ended up in the movie, with Wilder insisting that it was all Diamond’s idea. There’s one account that it was just a place-holder until they could come up with something better, but they never did. When Wilder was facing death himself, he insisted that his tombstone read, “I was a writer, but nobody’s perfect.”

Wilder’s difficulties with Marilyn Monroe have become legendary; she often showed up late on set, and during the studio work in Hollywood she would get so blocked that she would blow take after take on such simple lines as, “It’s me, Sugar,” or, “Where’s that bourbon?” Later, during the location work on Coronado, Marilyn would astonish Wilder by being line-perfect through whole pages of script. I’ve long suspected that Monroe was so traumatized by having grown up in L.A. and been surrounded by the film world (her mother was a negative cutter at MGM, a job that had no creative aspect but required highly precise work lest a mistake ruin a key scene and force an expensive retake) that she was simply that much more comfortable out of town. Wilder told an interviewer shortly after he finished Some Like It Hot, “It took me six months before I could look at my wife again and not hate her for being a woman,” though in 1969 he was a good deal more understanding when he talked about the film to Higham and Greenberg. “Marilyn Monroe was very sensitive, difficult, and disorganized,” Wilder said a decade after he made the film and seven years after Monroe’s still-mysterious death. “She tried hard, but she couldn’t help herself. In some cases you had to match shots from different takes to make it seem like she was giving a performance; but there were stretches when she was absolutely phenomenal: one of the great comediennes. Once she started rolling, and that tiny kind of an inhibition disappeared, she was wonderful, as good as anyone. The metabolism had to be right with her; and if it was right, she was a marvelous thing to direct; but I was utterly dependent on her moods.”

Ace in the Hole, a.k.a. The Big Carnival (Paramount, 1951)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, September 26) my husband Charles and I followed up Some Like It Hot with a quite different Billy Wilder film on Turner Classic Movies: Ace in the Hole, a 1951 masterpiece about the media and how people are manipulated by unscrupulous figures who frame their coverage of real events to move them emotionally. Ace in the Hole was Wilder’s first film after Sunset Boulevard (1950) and his first since breaking up his long-standing collaboration with producer Charles Brackett. He was riding high at his studio, Paramount, and after the sensational success of Sunset Boulevard he was able to get just about anything he wanted green-lighted. What he wanted to do was the story of a burned-out reporter named Charles “Chuck” Tatum (Kirk Douglas) who’s been fired by 11 different publishers and is now forced to work for the Albuquerque Star-Dispatch under editor Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall). Boot has a woven sampler framed on his wall with the words “TELL THE TRUTH,” which Tatum seems to regard as an insult. A year into his sentence at the Star-Dispatch, Tatum stumbles on a story which he figures can create a sensation that will be a springboard to restore him to the world of big-city journalism. A man named Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) has got trapped in a cave-in as he was exploring for Native American relics he could sell in his curio shop and trading post. Tatum immediately sees the story potential in Leo’s predicament, but only if it can be stretched out long enough to stay on the nation’s front pages for at least a week, especially after he hears that the local Natives have nicknamed the cave “The Curse of the Seven Vultures” and said there’s a curse on it that will kill anyone who removes artifacts from it: an easy and obvious “news hook” Tatum exploits to the hilt. Wilder and his co-writers, Walter Newman (who came up with the original idea under the title The Human-Interest Story) and Lesser Samuels (who joined the writing team because he’d worked on newspapers himself), have Tatum make common cause with the local sheriff, Gus Kretzer (Ray Teal), even though his nominal boss Boot is convinced that the sheriff is corrupt and the Star-Dispatch should be exposing him instead of cozying up to him. A local contractor named Sam Smollett (Frank Jaquet), who got the job through the sheriff’s influence, insists he can rescue Leo by shoring up the cave walls and he can do that in 16 hours. But that isn’t long enough for Tatum: instead he suggests that Smollett bring in a drill and bore a hole through the top of the mountain to rescue Leo from above, even though that will take a week.

Tatum’s copy gets picked up nationwide and leads to a sudden influx of people to visit the site and wait out Leo’s ordeal. This is a boon for Leo’s dissatisfied wife, Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling, who turns in a first-rate performance as a hard-bitten woman that should have made her an overnight star if Ace in the Hole had had the box-office success it deserved), who suddenly is doing huge amounts of business at Leo’s combination diner, gas station, and curio store. The influx of cash just reinforces her dream of leaving Leo, whom she married exactly five years earlier (their anniversary is a key plot point in the movie) only to find herself stuck in the middle of nowhere miles away from the wild life she craves. As Leo’s ordeal continues and his medical condition deteriorates despite the doctor (Harry Harvey) on scene, who’s sending him painkillers with which he can inject himself, so does his will to live, especially since the ceaseless pounding of the drill above him is keeping him from falling asleep. Meanwhile, a carnival has set up outside Leo’s cave and a country-music artist has written a song called “We’re Coming, Leo” and is performing on a makeshift stage while selling sheet-music copies of it to the captive audience. In one of Wilder’s cleverer in-jokes, the first outside person to show up at Leo’s ordeal is Al Federber (Frank Cady), an insurance salesman with the Pacific All-Risk company: the same outfit Fred MacMurray’s character worked for in Wilder’s 1944 classic film noir Double Indemnity. (Porter Hall, who plays the idealistic publisher Boot in Ace in the Hole, was in Double Indemnity too, as the fellow passenger on the train who briefly threatens to expose the murder plot involving MacMurray’s and Barbara Stanwyck’s characters.) Tatum tells his photographer and sidekick Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) midway through the story that they’re turning in their notices to the Star-Dispatch and offering their future copy to whichever big-city newspaper makes them the highest-paid bid, and the winner is Tatum’s former boss in New York, Nagel (Richard Gaines). Only Tatum’s finely honed plan goes awry when Leo announces that he literally has only hours to live, and if they don’t get him out of the cave soon he’s a-goner. Leo even pleads with Tatum to bring him a priest to administer the last rites.

Realizing that the great human-interest story he’s been pushing on the world won’t be worth a hill of beans if he can’t provide it a happy ending, Tatum asks contractor Smollett if they can get Leo out through the original plan of shoring up the cave walls – only Smollett tells Tatum that shoring won’t work anymore because the drilling has so weakened the cave walls that any attempt to enter the cave with the beams needed to shore it will risk a cave-in that will kill the crew. Meanwhile Lorraine, who’s been hoping she could seduce Tatum into taking her to New York with him, gets so angry that, after he nearly chokes her with a raggedy stole Leo had bought her as a wedding present, she stabs him in self-defense with a pair of scissors. Tatum learns that Leo has died with the drill just 10 feet away from him, and announces it to the crowd. Nagel, his once and future boss in New York, fires him again after the other papers scoop him on the news that Leo died, and Tatum collapses and dies himself on the floor of the Star-Dispatch newsroom. Ace in the Hole was a major hit in Europe and a major flop in the U.S., and Billy Wilder blamed himself for having pushed his cynicism too far for American audiences. While it had a real-life inspiration – the case of Kentucky coal-miner Floyd Collins, who in 1925 spent 2 ½ weeks trapped inside a mine before he, like Leo Minosa, finally died – Wilder told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in 1969 for their book The Celluloid Muse, “My mistake was in coaxing the American public into the theatre with the idea that they were going to get a cocktail, whereas instead they got a shot of vinegar.” He also said that he’d got the idea of a carnival outside from the real Floyd Collins case: “People criticized me for bad taste, but it all really happened. The audience, unfortunately, doesn’t want to see reality. Maybe I was wrong; maybe I should have tried to get them out of the rut instead of showing it to them on the screen.” As a result, Wilder decided to make mostly comedies for the rest of his career, apparently figuring that he could get audiences to accept his cynical view of the world but only if he leavened it with humor.

During the initial run of the film Paramount executive Y. Frank Freeman ordered its title changed from Ace in the Hole to The Big Carnival – which was the title it had when I first saw it on commercial TV in the early 1970’s and was blown away by it, regarding it as Wilder’s masterpiece. (Supposedly Wilder was so angry with Freeman that he began making jokes about the man’s name – “Why Frank Freeman?” – though elsewhere I’ve heard that joke attributed to two of Paramount’s biggest stars, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Once, the story goes, Hope said to Crosby, “I wish I knew the answer.” Crosby said, “What’s the question?,” and Hope answered, “Y. Frank Freeman?”) Ace in the Hole is also an example of the unfortunate course of Kirk Douglas’s career; in his early films (not only this one but The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Out of the Past, I Walk Alone, and Detective Story) he often played villains and he was quite good at it, but later on he became such a big star he could only be cast as heroes. While Ace in the Hole was far from the first film to depict journalists as amoral assholes interested only in “getting the story” no matter how many people they hurt in the process – Charlie Chaplin’s very first film, Making a Living (1914), had that sort of plot line – it’s a magnificent movie that could easily be remade today and might even be a hit in today’s market, given that Americans are losing faith in all their major institutions, including the media.