Fear and Desire (Kubrick Family, Joseph Burstyn Enterprises, 1952, released 1953)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 20) my husband Charles and I screened a new Blu-Ray disc containing Stanley Kubrick’s first feature film, Fear and Desire (1952), as well as three short films: Flying Padre and Day of the Fight (both 1951) released by RKO-Pathé; and The Seafarers (1953), made as a promotional film for the Seafarers’ International Union (SIU). Fear and Desire was produced by Kubrick’s relatives, particularly a rich uncle, pharmacist Martin Perveler, who put up most of the money. Contrary to the impression you might get from the title, which would seem to indicate a Gothic romance with admixtures of horror, it’s actually a war movie, a genre to which Kubrick would return to again and again: Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Barry Lyndon (1975), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). There’s a fascinating quote on Kubrick’s Wikipedia page in which he attempted to explain why he was so fascinated with war stories: “The criminal and the soldier at least have the virtue of being against something or for something in a world where many people have learned to accept a kind of grey nothingness, to strike an unreal series of poses in order to be considered normal. … It's difficult to say who is engaged in the greater conspiracy – the criminal, the soldier, or us.” Kubrick literally disowned Fear and Desire in later years, attempting to destroy all surviving prints and telling interviewers when the film was thought lost that it wasn’t really that bothersome because it had been a terrible movie. (Alfred Hitchcock said the same thing about his one totally lost film, 1926’s The Mountain Eagle.) When the Telluride Film Festival turned up a print, courtesy of the George Eastman House (Kubrick had had Eastman Kodak do his processing and they routinely made a safety copy of every film they worked on), and showed it in 1993, while Kubrick was still alive, he made his displeasure clear and tried to block the screening. Actually Fear and Desire is quite an estimable work, holding a similar place in Kubrick’s canon as the not-quite-finished Too Much Johnson (1938), also shot in upstate New York, does to Orson Welles’s.

Fear and Desire also was an early example of Kubrick’s notorious penchant for re-editing and trimming his films even after they were already being shown in theatres. The original director’s cut shown at the 1952 Venice Film Festival was 71 minutes, but it was trimmed in release to 62 minutes, largely by cutting some of the philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) ramblings writer Howard Sackler (a former high-school classmate of Kubrick’s) inserted into the script. The opening narration (another frequent Kubrick trademark: he used scene-setting narration in The Killing and Dr. Strangelove and planned to in 2001: A Space Odyssey as well, though at the last minute he junked the narration in 2001 and thereby made the film deeper and richer for being more ambiguous) is typical: “There is war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, or one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist, unless we call them into being. This forest, then, and all that happens now is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear, and doubt, and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind.” Fear and Desire opens in a forest in which four servicemembers, Lt. Corby (Kenneth Harp), Mac (Frank Silvera, who would also appear in Kubrick’s second feature, Killer’s Kiss), Sidney (Paul Mazursky, who would later become a major film director in his own right), and Fletcher (Stephen Colt), regroup after their plane has crashed. They realize they are behind enemy lines and hatch a plan to get themselves back to their comrades by building a raft and using it to travel down a river. Along the way they spy a farmhouse which is housing enemy soldiers, whom in an explosive action scene they kill en masse and steal their food (an unappetizing-looking stew) and guns. Later they run into three young women who are fishing the river. They take one of them (Virginia Leith) prisoner and tie her to a tree, leaving Sidney behind to guard her while the other three try to return to the raft and see if it’s still there. Alas, Sidney gets the hots for her and loosens her bonds so he can rape her. Instead she uses the opportunity to try to flee, and Sidney shoots her dead rather than let her escape and risk her reporting them to the enemy. (Virginia Leith got a rave review from columnist Walter Winchell for her brief role in Fear and Desire, which helped earn her a 20th Century-Fox contract; alas, after a few minor roles in good films like Black Widow and Violent Saturday, they dropped her and within a decade Leith was reduced to dreck like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.)

Mac finds the body of the dead girl and the insane Sidney, and the two of them set forth on the raft while Lt. Corby and Fletcher go back to the farmhouse intent on killing the enemy general who is stationed there. Mac distracts the enemy’s guards by shooting at them from the raft, and Corby and Fletcher kill the general and escape by stealing an enemy plane and using it to fly back to their own side. (The plane is the single biggest non sequitur in the movie; it’s an ordinary commercial general-aviation aircraft of a type no actually existing military would have been using in the early 1950’s.) Corby and Fletcher eventually reunite with the mortally wounded Mac and the crazy Sidney back at their side’s base camp as the film suddenly and abruptly ends. Fear and Desire was not only directed by Kubrick but photographed and edited by him, too, and it’s pretty obvious he used a high-contrast film stock (probably Kodak’s Tri-X) to add to the sense of documentary-like realism. Kubrick came to this film through an odd career path: during World War II he had worked as a still photographer for Stars and Stripes, the servicemembers’ magazine officially published by the U.S. Army. After the war he’d parlayed that experience into a job for Look, Life’s chief competitor, and then he started dabbling into film. In 1951 Kubrick shot two documentary shorts and later sold them to RKO-Pathé, the 10-minute Flying Padre (about a real-life priest, Fred Stadtmueller, who worked a parish in rural New Mexico and bought a plane so he could fly in and out of remote locations; the film’s climax comes when he flies a seriously ill young boy and his mother to a hospital so his life can be saved) and the 20-minute Day of the Fight (about aspiring middleweight boxer Walter Cartier; his twin brother and manager, Vincent Cartier; and his opponent, African-American boxer Bobby James). RKO released Flying Padre under the “Screenliner” label and Day of the Fight as part of a series called This Is America! Our Blu-Ray copy of Fear and Desire included as bonus items not only the two shorts Kubrick sold to RKO but a third one, The Seafarers, a 30-minute promotional film for the Seafarers International Union (SIU) which he made a year after Fear and Desire. The Seafarers was a surprise in that it was filmed in color – Kubrick didn’t use color again until Spartacus (1960), a big-budget Hollywood spectacular he took over after producer-star Kirk Douglas fired the original director, Anthony Mann. “I didn’t know Kubrick made a FitzPatrick travelogue!” Charles joked when we first noticed that The Seafarers was in color.

Naturally I looked up the Seafarers International Union online this morning to make sure it still existed (it does, thank goodness), though of the three Kubrick shorts on this disc Day of the Fight is easily the best. In fact, it makes me wish that Kubrick had made a movie about boxing (as his Fear and Desire actor Paul Mazursky did with The Great White Hope). The film’s narration stresses the long odds against anyone who pursues prizefighting as a professional career; it states that as of 1951 there were 6,000 would-be boxers in the U.S. but only 600 made enough money to make their livings from it. Cartier is presented here as a legitimate contender for a world’s championship, a status he never achieved partly because of a controversial fight against champion Randy Turpin in 1953, two years after this film was made. According to Cartier’s Wikipedia page, “Fought on March 17, 1953 at Kensington's Earl's Court Express in England, it ended with Cartier being disqualified for holding in round two. With the bout over, Cartier went after Turpin and his twin brother Vincent attacked the fight's referee. As a result, Cartier was fined 1,000 British pounds.” Cartier made an opportune career switch to acting, appearing in films and TV shows like the movie Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), which starred Paul Newman as champion boxer Rocky Graziano (the film had originally been intended for James Dean but, like The Left-Handed Gun, was recast with Newman after Dean’s death) and the first two seasons of The Phil Silvers Show. Also the Cartier family’s original name was McCarthy, but his grandfather had feared he and his kin would face anti-Irish discrimination, so he changed it first to “Carter” and then “Cartier.” I was amused that the narrator of Day of the Fight, Douglas Edwards, pronounced “Cartier” in the French style, “Car-Tee-Yay,” while the announcer at his fight called him “Cart-Yer.” The film also features a brief appearance by boxing journalist Nat Fleischer, whose Nat Fleischer’s Ring Book is considered the definitive history of the sport.

Overall the Kino Lorber disc of Fear and Desire and the three Kubrick shorts is a stimulating look at this great and endlessly fascinating director’s early career, and it’s a good thing Fear and Desire escaped its creator’s attempts to obliterate it. Kubrick called it “a pretentious, inept and boring film – a youthful mistake costing about $50,000 – but it was distributed by Joseph Burstyn in the art houses and caused a little ripple of publicity and attention. … I mean, there were people around who found some good things in it, and on the strength of that I was able to raise private financing to make a second feature-length film [Killer's Kiss, (1955)]. And that was a silly story, too, but my concern was still in getting experience and simply functioning in the medium, so the content of a story seemed secondary to me. I just took the line of least resistance, whatever story came to hand. And for another thing I had no money to live on at the time, much less to buy good story material with – nor did I have the time to work it into shape – and I didn't want to take a job, and get off the track, so I had to keep moving.” But both Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss seem to me to be quite estimable movies, flawed from their low-budget limitations but still showcasing a director of promise, and as I noted in my blog post on Kubrick’s third (and first fully professional) film, The Killing (1956), “The Killing is a quite accomplished film, though to my mind Kubrick’s second film, Killer’s Kiss (also a film noir) is even more dreamlike and hallucinatory.”

A Day's Pleasure (Charles Chaplin Productions, First National Pictures, 1919)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 20) Turner Classic Movies showed a rather odd-seeming grab bag of films on their “Silent Sunday Nights” feature: A Flirt’s Mistake and The Rounders (both 1914), Character Studies (1923), and The Movies (1925). It turned out that what linked these movies together was the involvement of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (1887-1933), the second most popular male silent-era comedian (next to Charlie Chaplin) until his career was wiped out overnight when he hosted a “wild” party in San Francisco on September 5, 1921. Among the guests were starlet Virginia Rappé, who was found seriously ill when the party broke up and died of a ruptured bladder four days later. Arbuckle was arrested and tried for Rappé’s murder – though modern researchers generally agree that Rappé’s death was accidental, the result of an infection she got from a botched illegal abortion. Arbuckle went through three trials and his legal plight was such a boon to the news business that William Randolph Hearst once said coverage of Arbuckle’s case had sold more papers than anything since the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.) He was ultimately acquitted, but the film industry blacklisted him and forced him to keep himself alive as a director under the pseudonym “Will B. Goodrich.” (When the news of who that was finally came out, the joke around Hollywood was it was an Arbuckle pun on “will be good and rich,” though the name actually came from Arbuckle’s father, William Goodrich Arbuckle.) Arbuckle finally got a shot at a comeback when Warner Bros. signed him to make six sound shorts in 1933, and they did well enough they promised him a shot at a feature film, only he died of a heart attack at age 46 before that could happen. The TCM program on Arbuckle included two films he made at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios and two in his “Will B. Goodrich” directorial days. One of the Keystone films was The Rounders, a minor masterpiece in which Arbuckle and Chaplin co-starred; I remember seeing this as part of a five-film Chaplin at Keystone collection which proved how much better Chaplin’s movies got once he was permitted to write and direct them himself. The Rounders seemed to me the prototype of all the Laurel and Hardy movies, and it’s worth remembering that before either of them had made a movie Stan Laurel had understudied Chaplin in Fred Karno’s music-hall troupe and Chaplin based The Rounders on a skit he’d done for Karno.

Because Charles and I were busy watching the Blu-Ray disc of Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire and the three shorts included as bonus content, we missed the Arbuckle movies but I got to watch A Day’s Pleasure, an unusually rare Chaplin short from 1919 that I’d never seen before. At least part of the reason was that from the time Chaplin signed with First National Pictures in 1918 he owned all his subsequent movies outright, and many of them were not seen again until the 1970’s when Chaplin went over them, prepared background musical scores, and sometimes re-edited them for official reissues. A Day’s Pleasure is a minor Chaplin film, created while Chaplin was concentrating on bigger things: specifically his feature-film debut, The Kid (1920). (The Kid was one film Chaplin severely screwed up when he re-edited it for the 1970’s reissue; if you can locate a copy of the original public-domain version, grab it!) Chaplin had already signed Jackie Coogan to play the title role of The Kid, and in order to screen-test him he gave him a minor role in A Day’s Pleasure. A Day’s Pleasure is different from the run-of-the-mill Chaplin film in at least one particular: though he’s mostly dressed in the familiar “Tramp” costume, with a jacket too small for him and pants too large, he’s not playing lower-class here (and his shoes are the right size instead of too big for his feet, as they were in the full-out “tramp” costume): he’s sufficiently established in the working class to have a wife (Edna Purviance), two sons (Marion Feducha and Jackie Coogan), a stand-alone suburban home, and a Model “T” Ford car. The family set out on a weekend outing involving buying tickets for an excursion boat, and to get there Chaplin goes through an unequal struggle with his car’s hand crank. (Other cars had self-starters by 1919 but Henry Ford, anxious to keep costs down, still had the Model “T” equipped with a hand crank so you needed to start it manually – and a lot of people worried that the kickback from the crank would break their arms.) For some reason Chaplin keeps trying to get into his car via the right side – was he still thinking of how people drive in his native Britain? – and whenever he does that, the car shudders to a halt and the motor stops running, meaning he needs to get out and crank it again. He finally gets his trip going by literally crawling over Edna to get to the steering wheel. Once the family gets to the dock and gets on the boat, they have a new set of problems. The boat is starting to sail when Chaplin arrives and the only way he can get on is by using the body of a heavy-set woman (apparently played by Tom Wood in drag!) as a gangplank.

Once they’re all on the boat Chaplin finds that the seat next to Edna and their kids has been taken by a large, obnoxious fellow passenger (Tom Wilson) and his even larger and more obnoxious wife (Babe London). A Day’s Pleasure is one of Chaplin’s nastiest films, as he literally attacks the male passenger who’s got in his way and even at one point comes close to kicking him off the boat. (I remember one writer for The Nation who praised Chaplin’s comedy for delivering a good, swift kick in the pants to authority figures and others who needed it, but it occurred to me that over his career Chaplin got more kicks in the pants than he gave. Not in this movie, though.) There’s also a quite surprising scene in which Chaplin runs afoul of an all-Black jazz band playing on the deck of the excursion boat (and, though they appear to be genuinely Black instead of white actors in blackface, their names, with one exception, are listed on imdb.com only with initials: C. Allen, J. A. Irvin, El Sorral, and the one who actually gets a full name, John Williams – ironic in itself because a white man named John Williams is now, and has been for decades, the most prominent living film composer). That surprised me because, according to Theodore Huff’s 1947 biography of Chaplin, he'd said about Blacks, “I never laugh at their humor. They have suffered too much ever to be funny to me” – yet here he is doing a gag in which the Black trombone player tickles Chaplin’s upper lip with his slide so much Chaplin literally grabs the instrument and throws it overboard. (I felt too sorry for the poor guy losing his trombone to find it funny.) Chaplin also has an unequal (and extended) wrestling match with a deck chair he’s trying desperately and unsuccessfully to assemble, in a scene that seems to have been copied in just about every comedy taking place in a watercraft. He also trips over a sandwich vendor (Loyal Underwood) who got in his face. The family finally gets back from their cruise but that’s not the end of their troubles: Chaplin is stopped at an intersection by an officious cop who tells him to go back where he came from – an obvious impossibility in the highly crowded intersection. Then he bumps his car against a truck that’s carrying a barrel of highly sticky tar, which immobilizes the cop who was trying to ticket him. There’s one great gag scene in which one of the cops (there were two, one relatively lightweight and one heavy-set) falls down a manhole and then emerges again when its cover (obviously just a trash-can lid because a real manhole cover would have been way too heavy) pops open and he thrusts out. A Day’s Pleasure is minor Chaplin, but also proof that even the minor work of a genius can still be great.

The Ocean Between Them (10260287 Manitoba, Evoke Canadian Pictures, Evoke Entertainment, Corus Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 19) I bypassed Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” showing on Turner Classic Movies (he was doing the 1948 film Key Largo, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, in their final film together even though he had eight more years to live) and instead watched an O.K. Lifetime made-for-TV production, The Ocean Between Them. Directed (quite effectively) by Gabriel Correa from a committee-written script (Yuri Baranovsky, Angela Guiner, and Sam Lee get the writing credits), The Ocean Between Them is a well-made but pretty predictable thriller about an overprotective single mother, Joan Callahan (Rebecca Gayehart) and her two daughters, 20-something Miranda (Jessica Lord) and teenager Ashley (Georgia Dane). Joan has been overprotective ever since the backstory, when Miranda nearly died in a rock-climbing accident. Joan nursed her back to health in a hospital room that had two butterflies nesting outside its window but there’ve been tensions between them ever since. Joan wants Miranda to pull back from her free-swinging lifestyle as well as her drinking; when the film opens she and Ashley are impatiently waiting for Miranda’s plane to return from Rome, where Miranda has taken her latest vacation, to their small town in Oklahoma. Joan has peppered Miranda’s cell phone with increasingly frantic where-the-hell-are-you type calls, and just as they’ve about given up on her Miranda bursts in, obviously drunk. She swings her bag in the hall accidentally and breaks a ceramic vase, much to Joan’s consternation (fortunately at least the writers spared us the information that this was a vase worth five figures and/or a priceless family heirloom!). Miranda further upsets Joan by announcing that she’s only going to stay a day and a half before she goes on vacation again, this time to the (real) Caribbean island of Belize. Then Miranda has a look through some old photos of Joan in a box she was intending to put in storage, and she learns that Joan was quite the adventuress herself in her day, including taking wild trips that involved machete-wielding hikes through rain forests. After the girlfriend Miranda was intending to take with her to Belize bails, Miranda impulsively invites her mom to join her as her traveling companion (what arrangements they make for Ashley are not clear; maybe they trust her to be alone for the week or two they’re going to be gone, and in any event Ashley departs from the story completely once Miranda and Joan set off on their trip).

When they get to Belize they meet some charming young Black men who work at their resort, including headwaiter Isaac and his cousin, bartender Luke (Karl Walcott), who turns out to live most of the year in Dallas and just comes to Belize because his dad was from there until dad died some time before. The first night they’re there Miranda sneaks off for a rendezvous with Luke and spends the night with him, much to her mom’s understandable discomfiture (though there’s a hint that Joan was actually jealous and interested in Luke herself). The film’s main intrigue occurs when Miranda rents a kayak and for some reason ventures into the ocean, then gets caught in a couple of tropical storms. (The movie opened with a scene in which Miranda’s kayak is greeted by a shark, which then cuts to a flashback until the shark scene reappears two-thirds of the way into the running time.) The film cuts back and forth between Miranda’s ordeal at sea and Joan’s increasingly frantic attempts to get a rescue party to find her, which at one point involves her having to raise $1,200 in cash to hire a (white) private-plane pilot to look for her from the air. (What they were supposed to do for her if they’d spotted her was unclear; if the aircraft had been a helicopter they could at least theoretically have rescued her from it, but not with a plane.) Ultimately after both storms subside the local boat pilot, Captain Miguel Gonzalez (Adrian Garbutt), takes his boat out with Joan in hopes of finding her. At first they miss Miranda’s signal, but ultimately Miranda and Joan swim out to each other and she’s rescued at long last. Instead of the payoff I was expecting, which was that the two Callahans would forever swear off further adventuring, they talk about going on a trip to Alaska and riding dog-drawn sleds. I give director Correa a lot of credit for highly effective suspense editing (even though there’s not much doubt about the outcome; stories like this end unhappily all too often in real life, but not in Lifetime movies!) and even more credit for effectively and credibly reproducing the Caribbean off the coast of Manitoba in southern Canada, where the film was shot. I quite liked The Ocean Between Them even though it was all too predictable and the acting, though credible, wasn’t any great shakes. Rebecca Gayehart’s attitude as Joan just got to be really overbearing at times, and cinematographer Greg Nicod seemed to be going for too many shots of Jessica Lord in fashionable states of undress, with as much of her cleavage showing as he could dare for a basic-cable movie, rendering her less a sympathy-inducing victim than a bit of sexual delectation for any young straight men who might have stumbled onto the cable network that used to bill itself as “Television for Women”!

12 Years a Slave (Regency Enterprises, River Road Entertainment, Plan B Entertainment, New Regency Productions, Film4, Summit Entertainment, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013)

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

Last night (Friday, September 18) my husband Charles and I watched a compelling but also draining movie called 12 Years a Slave, made in 2013 by director Steve McQueen (an African-British filmmaker and not the legendary late white American action star of the 1960’s and 1970’s) from a script by John Ridley based on an 1853 slave memoir by Solomon Northup. Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was a free Black man living in Saratoga, New York in 1841 and making an occasional living as a violinist (Ejiofor looks credible playing the instrument, though Tim Fain was his soundtrack double). Then he was lured away from his relatively comfortable life with his wife Anne (Kelsey Scott), daughter Margaret (Quvenzhané Wallis), and son Alonzo (Cameron Zeigler) by two white entrepreneurs, Brown (Scoot McNairy) and Hamilton (Taran Killam). They say they want him to perform with their circus for two weeks, but they get him drunk on the first night and when he comes to he’s literally shackled and being held in a slave pen. He’s in the custody of slave dealers James H. Burch (Christopher Berry) and Theophilus Freeman (Paul Giamatti), who announce to him that he’s considered a runaway slave from Georgia named Platt. He’s sold to New Orleans (in Northup’s original memoir he mentions that a smallpox epidemic broke out among the slaves in his shipment and one of them died and was buried along the way, but this isn’t included in the movie) and ends up the property of plantation owner William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). Ford takes a liking to “Platt” and gives him a violin so he can entertain his guests at plantation “big house” parties, but his overseer Tibeats (Paul Dano) can’t stand him and rides him hard until Northup makes the mistake of fighting back, grabbing the whip with which Tibeats was about to beat him. Tibeats and his gang attempt to lynch Northup, and he’s strung up for hours until Ford finally comes along and rescues him. Ford has financial troubles and tries to get of them by selling Northup a.k.a. “Platt” to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender, who also starred in McQueen’s immediately previous film Shame), who’s described in the dialogue as “a notorious nigger-breaker.” (I like the fact that what’s usually and cutesily described these days as “the ‘N’-word” is used throughout this film, not only by white characters expressing their racism but by Black ones, often criticizing each other for having given in so totally to the slave mentality they’ve lost all will to resist.)

Epps is also having a decidedly nonconsensual affair – remember that under the laws of slavery a man had a legal right to rape anyone he owned because they were considered “property” – with Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), a slave on his plantation and either his star cotton-picker (she’s reported as picking over 500 pounds a day when everybody else is picking in the high 100’s or low 200’s) or getting her stats inflated by the owner’s obvious interest in her. Epps’s interest in Patsey is so obvious that his wife (Sarah Paulson) has got jealous of her, though when she complains to Epps he reminds her that she was just a poor white-trash girl he picked up in a bar and he can always send her back from whence she came. At one point, thinking of escape, Northup wanders through the woods, only to be discouraged when he comes upon a lynching party of poor whites who’d captured runaway slaves and, instead of returning them to their masters, just killed them. Northup hasn’t given up hope of contacting his family up North and getting them to lobby for his release, but when he puts together writing materials (stealing paper from a supply Mrs. Epps told him to buy her, carving his own pen, and making his ink from blackberry juice), he entrusts its delivery to Armsby (Garret Dillahunt). Armsby is a white former slave overseer who fell into alcoholism and ended up reduced to being a common field hand, picking cotton alongside the slaves he used to drive. But Armsby double-crosses Northup to Epps in hopes of getting his old overseer job back, and a frustrated Northup burns the letter he wrote his wife because for a slave it’s a whipping offense to know how to read and write. Meanwhile Patsey has sneaked off the Epps plantation to visit another one nearby, and Epps catches her and insists that she be whipped within an inch of her life. Epps seems to think Patsey was whoring herself to the other plantation owner, but she was really just asking for soap because the jealous Mrs. Epps had forbidden her to have any and without being able to bathe, she was starting to reek so much she was offended by her own smell. (Was Mrs. Epps hoping that by making Patsey literally stink, she’d get her husband to stop screwing her?) Patsey asks that Northup be assigned to administer the whipping, but Epps notices that Northup is pulling his blows, grabs the whip himself, and nearly kills Patsey with the force of his beating her. Then Patsey receives treatment with an improvised salve made by her fellow slaves, whose application seems to hurt her almost as much as the whipping did.

After years enduring the Kafkaesque torture of being wrongly enslaved, Northup is finally saved through an unlikely white deus ex machina, Bass (Brad Pitt, delivering a surprisingly sensitive performance), a building contractor from Canada who’s hired by Epps to build a gazebo on his property. Bass gets Northup to help with the construction, and while they’re working together he tells Northup that he’s morally opposed to slavery. Northup feels safe confiding in Bass despite what happened to him the last time he trusted a white man to help him, and he tells him his whole origin story. Bass promises to help, which he does by mailing Northup’s latest attempt to write his wife and children and getting Parker (Rob Steinburg), a store owner the Northups knew in New York, to come with him to Louisiana and identify Northup to the local sheriff as someone who’s legally free. Northup returns home to New York the free man he always was by law, and he meets his wife, and children (now grown adults; Margaret is played by Devyn A. Tyler and she has a husband, played by Willo Jean-Baptiste, and a child of her own, so Northup learns he’s a grandfather). A printed epilogue states that Northup tried to have his abductors prosecuted but couldn’t because in Washington, D.C., where the initial crime took place, Blacks were not allowed to testify in court against whites. Instead he became an activist for abolition and wrote a memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (note that Northup’s title began with the word “Twelve” while the film’s begins with the numeral), which he dedicated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe noted that Northup had spent his twelve years as a slave in the Red River country of Louisiana, where Stowe had set her novel, and she used his memoir as a counter to people who accused her of making up the story out of whole cloth to make slavery look bad. At least partly because of Stowe’s endorsement, Northup’s book sold three times as many copies as Frederick Douglass’s memoir of his years as a slave.

Northup ended his book with these words: “My narrative is at an end. I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery. Those who read this book may form their own opinions of the ‘peculiar institution.’ What it may be in other States, I do not profess to know; what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these pages. This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana. But I forbear. Chastened and subdued in spirit by the sufferings I have borne, and thankful to that good Being through whose mercy I have been restored to happiness and liberty, I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps.” (Ironically, it’s not known when and where Northup died, or where his remains ended up; modern historian Joseph Logsdon, who co-edited a 1968 republication of Twelve Years a Slave, planned to make a search but died himself before he could do so.) Though 12 Years a Slave is a powerful denunciation of slavery as it existed in the American South in the 1840’s and the 1850’s, I did feel after a while that I was being manipulated. I wondered whether screenwriter Ridley had cherry-picked Northup’s memoir to highlight the most brutal aspects of his experience, or whether Northup himself had done so when he wrote his original book. Modern critic Eric Herschtal has acknowledged, “Slave narratives were never intended to give an unbiased view. They were anti-slavery polemics meant to bring down the institution.”

Technically, 12 Years a Slave is a well-made movie; while director McQueen and his cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, occasionally falls into past-is-brown effects (perhaps justifying it because when their movie takes place, nighttime illumination still relied on candles and occasionally lamps), much of the film takes place during bright daylight. There’s an almost tactile sense of the beauty of the countryside and an ironic contrast with the horrific events taking place in it. Also McQueen and Bobbitt include a few gimmicky visuals, including the sight of a paddle-wheel steamer churning up the river water, for the most part they shoot the film plainly and effectively. Ironically, Charles had the opposite reaction to the film than I did; he thought there were too many scenes of the slaves celebrating each other, washing each other (it occurred to me that a large part of the racist myth that Blacks smell worse than whites is a legacy of both slavery and the subsequent plantation sharecropping system that condemned most of them to farm labor, which among other things gave them few opportunities to wash), singing spirituals and, in one remarkable scene, sending off a dead comrade to “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” (For some reason, Nicholas Britell, who assisted composer Hans “Room Man” Zimmer in writing the film’s score, junked the song’s beautiful original melody and wrote one of his own.) There’s even one strange scene in which the slave masters are getting their slaves to sing a rather strange song called “Run, Nigger, Run,” which was one of the old African-American folk songs Alan and John Lomax collected in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It seemed bizarre, to say the least, that white slave owners would encourage their slaves to sing a song that at least appears to celebrate a slave’s escape. There are also a few scenes showing the carefully sanitized version of Christianity the masters were teaching their slaves, one which emphasized the duty of slaves to submit to their owners and downplayed all that stuff about the Israelites escaping bondage. (I’ve heard elsewhere that there was a special “slaves’ Bible” – which white ministers read to the slaves because slaves were punished severely if they learned to read or write – which cut the entire Book of Exodus down to just three chapters.) After we watched the film I joked to Charles that if Verdi had been submitted this script as an opera libretto, he probably would have turned it down as too extreme and downbeat.

I also thought a lot about the 1942 Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur masterpiece I Walked with a Zombie, and in particular of how much more courage it took to make an anti-racist film in 1942 than it did in 2013. Though I Walked with a Zombie takes place in the 1942 present, well after the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1834 (31 years before the U.S. did it, and without having to endure a civil war over it), it’s clear that the rich white characters are all suffering from the moral burden of still living lives of privilege based on fortunes accumulated from slave labor. My admiration for I Walked with a Zombie (despite its horrible title) has grown over the years, especially when I realized the significance of Val Lewton having tried to talk David O. Selznick out of making Gone with the Wind; maybe instead of doubting the commercial appeal of Margaret Mitchell’s romanticization of the ante-bellum South and its “peculiar institution,” Lewton was giving it a “woke” reading, seeing the depiction of slavery in Gone with the Wind as the racist nonsense it is. By now virtually everyone in the U.S. (with occasional exceptions like Florida Governor Ron De Santis, who’s on record as making the preposterous claim that slavery benefited the slaves by teaching them manual skills) pretty much agrees that slavery was a terrible thing. It’s a point underscored in one of the few genuinely subtle scenes in 12 Years a Slave, in which slaves are being examined by potential purchasers as if they were livestock and one slave dealer boasts that a particular piece of merchandise “hasn’t been sick a day in his life.” (Today he'd be a used-car dealer similarly assuring the would-be buyer that the car he’s selling has never been in an accident.) At least the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave 12 Years a Slave the Best Picture award – it still rankles me that six years later they gave the Best Picture Oscar to Green Book, a liberal film in which the Black characters exist merely to provide moral redemption to the white ones, instead of a radical masterpiece like Black Panther in which the Black characters (even the unsympathetic ones) have agency and independence – but as I noted above, the kind of up-front anti-racist stance Lewton and Tourneur took in I Walked with a Zombie (and probably got away with only because it was written off as another cheap horror “B” with a lurid title) in 1942 really wasn’t that much of a risk, either artistically or commercially, in 2013.

The Shadow Scholars (White Teeth Films, Lammas Park, Doc Society, Film4, Dogwoof Sales, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 17) I went to the First Unitarian-Universalist Church on the cusp between Hillcrest and Mission Hills to attend a film screening of a quite compelling 2024 documentary called The Shadow Scholars. The film was written and directed by Eloïse King (though her imdb.com page deletes her umlaut), described in the screening notes as “a Queer, London-born, Caribbean filmmaker who adopts an interdisciplinary approach to telling complex stories that foreground marginalized perspectives within mainstream and popular culture.” The Shadow Scholars is about the $15 billion per year industry that has arisen in Kenya in which Kenyan students with bachelors’, masters’, and even Ph.D. degrees ghost-write everything from college term papers to theses and dissertations for mostly white students from the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The main on-screen presence is Professor Patricia Kingori, who was born in Kenya, moved as a child with her mother to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, then moved again with her mom to London in her early teens. While there she read a book on sociology left behind by one of her mother’s friends, was fascinated by the discipline, and determined to study it and make it her career. Kingori found out about a night course in sociology that she could enroll in at age 14, but only if she found a “responsible adult” to co-sign her application. She asked the class’s teacher to be her co-signer, and the teacher turned her down. Then she went back to her mother (also named Patricia), who was not surprisingly upset that her daughter hadn’t asked her to co-sign. Mom said she would co-sign as long as Patricia agreed to use whatever knowledge she gained from her coursework to help her people achieve power. Kingori ultimately made it into the British academic establishment and won a full professorship at Oxford, though her claim to be “the youngest Black Oxbridge professor and one of the youngest women to ever be awarded a full professorship at the University of Oxford” has been disputed. Her Wikipedia page states, “According to the official UK Companies House register, Patricia Kingori's date of birth is November 1977. She was appointed to a full professorship in December 2021, meaning she was 44, not 28, at the time.” (Certainly, from her appearance in the film, she’s more believable as a 40-something than a 20-something or 30-something.)

Kingori has made a specialty of studying fraud and fakery in medical research, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but also in the Caribbean and in the developed world, and according to the film her own masters’ thesis was stolen by someone else in 2012, though she couldn’t do anything about it because the alleged thief was higher up in the academic hierarchy than she and adopted the defense, “Why would I need to steal from her?” Ironically given her background and especially her research specialization on academic fraud, Kingori’s presentation of the material in The Shadow Scholars is remarkably fair-minded. She depicts the professional paper-writers in Kenya with a great deal of sympathy, especially since they’re trapped in a system in which they’ve been promised a bill of goods – work hard and get a college education, and they’ll have a good life – only to find that there are virtually no jobs for them. (This is increasingly a problem for college students in the developed world as well, especially American students who graduate with five- or six-figure student loan debts and then find that the only jobs available for them pay far less than they would need to repay those loans.) The Shadow Scholars is a fascinating story in many respects, including the irony that in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries Europeans philosophically justified the practice of enslaving and colonizing Africans by saying they were mentally inferior to whites, and now we’re expropriating their intellectual brilliance for our own profit. Director King makes the point by juxtaposing early 20th century footage of Black American sharecroppers working on cotton plantations (as well as including an aside about how cotton processing equipment actually invented by slaves became, like everything else they did, the legal and intellectual property of their slaveowners) with modern-day scenes of Kenyan contract writers cranking out paper after paper for the benefit of the well-to-do clients who can afford to pay them. There’s also an ironic wrinkle in that the Kenyan writers often speak to their clients via voice filters that make them sound like American or British English speakers and thus conceal from the people paying them that they’re actually speaking to someone in Africa.

It’s also fascinating that the only people who use the morally loaded term “contract cheating” to describe the practice are white First World academics, including a woman professor from UC San Diego who actually met with Kingori to discuss the issue. My husband Charles noticed the above and said that the Kenyan writing industry has actually taken over the market from white Americans and Europeans who used to do this sort of work. He mentioned author Nick Mamatas, who recalled ghost-writing term papers for mathematics and engineering students who were actually far smarter than he was but were from non-English-speaking countries and therefore couldn’t write the English class papers required of them to graduate. One of the many ironies that abound in this film is that the writing industry is functioning like every other developing industry under capitalism: the assignments come from supervising editors who farm them out to mid-level managers before giving them to the people who actually do the work. One interviewee talked about working his way up through the management chain so he can be taking the bigger cuts without having to do the grunt work of actually writing. Another writer, a woman, recalled doing two term papers in one night on two totally different subjects, which had audience members wondering just how she pulled it off. (I can remember from my own days as a college student in my 20’s pulling all-nighters I can’t imagine myself being able to do today.) And the final irony in The Shadow Scholars is that the entire term-paper industry is being threatened by technological change: in this case by artificial intelligence (A.I.), which has the capability to ghost-write acceptable papers, theses, and dissertations itself without human intervention. Some of the writers interviewed in the film (adding to the ironies, King said she used A.I. herself to disguise their identities and make it harder for people to find out who they are) talked about adapting to the threat of A.I. by devising ways to edit A.I.-composed papers to add human touches to them so they will seem less like A.I. products and more like the work of human beings.

One young man said he had ambitions to study in Europe and obtain a masters’ degree, though he’s already done enough work for 10 masters’ degrees – he’s just done it under other people’s names. All that’s holding him back from an academic career in Europe is the money, though I couldn’t help but wonder if he actually did get the funding to study abroad, if his masters’ thesis will be red-flagged by an online plagiarism detector which would note its similarities … to a paper he himself wrote under contract to someone else. The post-film discussion had some interesting points; most of the people in the audience were retirees who’d worked in academe and therefore took the whole challenge the writing industry poses to academic integrity seriously. The film itself made the point that you might not know, when going into surgery for cancer, that your doctor essentially bought an unearned degree from a Kenyan term paper mill. One woman in the audience who’d earned a masters’ degree legitimately for a paper she wrote found herself wondering how many of the other papers she cited as sources had actually been ghost-written by Kenyans or others. The Shadow Scholars offers fascinating insights into the fundamental corruption behind academe, and in particular how we as a society decide what are the “good” schools and which (and whose) credentials we will accept as “legitimate” and therefore establish who we let run things, including operating on our bodies. The film briefly mentioned the scandal surrounding actress Felicity Huffman and 30 other celebrities who got caught using a service that promised to get their children into top-notch Ivy League institutions, and the relentless competition to get into America’s supposed but largely fictitious meritocracies has reached so far down that even at pre-school level parents are fighting each other like mad to ensure that their children get into the best pre-schools, which will get them into the best grade schools, which will get them into the best high schools, which will get them into the best colleges, which will get them into the best jobs. And yet all this is happening in a country whose ruling elites are filled with people who pride themselves on being anti-intellectual and announce they’re basing their decisions on idiotic prejudices masquerading as “common sense.”

78th Annual Emmy Awards (Jesse Collins Entertainments, Academy of Television Arts and Scleices, NBC-TV, aired September 14, 2026)

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

Last night (Monday, September 14) I watched all three hours of the 78th annual Emmy Awards on NBC. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been interested in this – it’s an awards show honoring TV programs, most of which are on so-called “streaming” channels that are unavailable to me – but it was being hosted by one of my favorite celebrities: Mariska Hargitay, long-time (27 seasons and counting) star of the TV series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I saw Hargitay on Jimmy Kimmel’s program promoting the show and appearing in a full-length black dress, the first time I can recall seeing her in anything other than the skin-tight pants she wears on SVU. (When she and Christopher Meloni co-starred on the first 12 seasons, I used to joke that SVU had two groups of fans: Gay men who thought Christopher Meloni was hot and straight men who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot.) On the Kimmel show she explained that her first name is pronounced “Marishka,” since she’s of Hungarian ancestry (her mother was movie star Jayne Mansfield and her father was Hungarian-born muscleman Mickey Hargitay) and in Hungarian the “s” becomes “sh.” (My husband Charles joked that if she was going to be that serious about using the Hungarian form of her name, she should call herself “Hargitay Mariska,” since Hungarians – alone among Europeans – put the family name first and the given name last.) The Emmy Awards were even more interminable than most awards show, because there were very few musical numbers to break the monotony of introduce presenter-announce nominees-give the Emmy to … Ironically, the biggest highlight of the show was a musical number: Reba McIntire doing a wonderfully heartfelt tribute to the late Dolly Parton by singing one of her more obscure songs, “Appalachian Memories.” The show opened with Hargitay doing a sort-of number, a parody of “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” (a hit for Joan Jett but which I later learned was actually written by two British men, Allan Merrill and Jake Hooker, in 1975 for a band they were in called The Arrows. Jett heard the song in 1976 while on a British tour with her first band, The Runaways, and tried to get them to perform it. When they refused, she recorded it twice, first in 1979 with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of The Sex Pistols, which went nowhere; and then with her subsequent band, The Blackhearts, in 1981, where it became her star-making hit) about the enduring appeal of television.

Mariska Hargitay isn’t that great a singer (neither was her mom, come to think of it, though in 1965 Jayne Mansfield recorded a halfway decent single called “Suey” with a then-unknown young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix) but she had enough of a voice to get the job done. There was also a nice version of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” sung by Noah Kahan with a discreet string quartet backing to herald the “In Memoriam” segment, featuring a number of people I’d heard of as well as a lot I hadn’t. “In Memoriam” was hosted by Macaulay Culkin, Dan Levy, and a woman whose name I didn’t catch paying special tribute to Catherine O’Hara, who played Culkin’s mother in the movies Home Alone and Home Alone 2. (I’m still amazed that Culkin’s incandescent performance in the 2003 independent drama Party Monster didn’t give him the boost he deserved and the entrée into a major adult career.) The surviving cast members of Charlie’s Angels, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd (the last of whom was a mid-run replacement for the late Farrah Fawcett Majors), appeared to present the award for Best Drama Series to The Pitt. The Pitt was created in 2025 by show runner R. Scott Gemmill, who appeared last night to accept its award, along with Noah Wyle (pronounced “Wylie”), who also stars, and John Wells. It was largely inspired by the stresses placed on emergency room physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021. Ironically, it’s being hailed as a ground-breaking portrayal of the stresses on medical professionals in general, and those who work in emergency rooms in particular, when in fact George Clooney got his big break on a similarly themed program, ER. (Then again Mariska Hargitay’s presentation on Charlie’s Angels had its own bit of first-itis; she said that as a young woman she watched Charlie’s Angels regularly and it gave her the idea that she, too, could play a hot-looking, sexily dressed police detective. Actually, her role on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit owes a lot more to Angie Dickinson’s part on Police Woman than it does to Charlie’s Angels, whose stars played private detectives, not official policewomen. And I remember an article I read in People about a decade ago in which Hargitay said she took the part on SVU because it was the first role she’d been offered who wasn’t a dumb-blonde sex-kitten character like the ones her mom had played.)

The big winners last night were the drama series The Pitt and the comedy Widow’s Bay, which I’ve never seen but judging from its Wikipedia page comes off like a part ripoff and part spoof of Jaws. Widow’s Bay (the location) is a New England beach town whose government is trying to promote it as a tourist destination despite the place being cursed by various thousands-of-years-old unseen menaces. Instead of a shark, the main threat to the Widow’s Bay tourist trade is an ancient octopus, and the show’s musical theme includes lots of gurgling noises that supposedly represent the octopus lying in wait, ready to ensnare any bathers who come too close to it. The last time I watched the Emmy Awards on September 20, 2020 the big comedy winner was a Canadian show called Schitt’s Creek, and by order of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), every time the show’s name was spoken, its logo had to be flashed on the air to make sure the audience knew it was the show’s name and not the vulgarism for excrement. Another high point of the show was the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award going to Michael J. Fox for both his personal and professional struggle against Parkinson’s disease; after he was diagnosed with it himself he organized a foundation to raise money and fund research aimed at improving the treatments for it and ultimately hopefully discovering a cure. I must admit I had a long-standing prejudice against Michael J. Fox because of his star-making role as the Right-wing son of two Left-wing parents on the TV sitcom Family Ties – I guess he was good enough in the role he convinced me his politics were really that terrible. I also resented the weird portrayal of him as essentially the inventor of rock ‘n’ roll in the first Back to the Future movie (he plays a lick at a school dance in the 1950’s that Chuck Berry hears, copies, and uses as the basis of his style; they even played him on with a bit of “Johnny B. Goode”!), but it was nice to see him again. I was a bit perplexed that he was being pushed in a manual wheelchair (made by the Drive company, which also made the rollator I’ve used occasionally since my knee replacement) instead of using a power chair (though maybe his Parkinson’s is so far advanced he can’t operate the controls of a power wheelchair).

I was also impressed that actor Matthew Rhys won two Emmy awards for acting, one on a limited series called The Beast in Me in which he plays a man whose suburban neighbor (Claire Danes) begins to suspect he murdered his previous wife, and one for Widow’s Bay. I was gratified that Stephen Colbert won for The Late Show on its last season, and surprised that Colbert came out wearing a full beard. He’d briefly grown one on the show just after he returned to doing it in front of an audience after the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions ended, only to announce one week in that he was shaving it because his wife Evie was complaining that it itched her when they kissed. (I joked that if I could learn to live with Charles’s beard, she can learn to live with his.) Another big winner from last night’s show was Pluribus, described on Wikipedia as “an American post-apocalyptic science fiction television series created by Vince Gilligan for Apple TV. Set and filmed primarily in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the series follows novelist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), who finds herself isolated after an alien virus transforms the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive mind, which nevertheless seeks to assimilate her and other immune individuals.” Seehorn won an acting award for it; and Allison Janney, one of the few people on last night’s show I’d actually heard of before, won for The Diplomat, in which she played the title character who finds she’s in way over her head in her latest posting. The show lumbered on to a limp conclusion in which Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson did a thoroughly lame “comedy” routine inspired by a new Apple TV miniseries in which they play celebrities who discover they are half-brothers. They dragged this routine on to excruciating lengths before they finally announced the winner of the Best Comedy Series award – which, to utterly no one’s surprise, was Widow’s Bay.

The Women (Max Gordon Plays and Pictures, Loew’s, MGM, 1939)

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

The film I watched two nights ago (Sunday, September 13) on Turner Classic Movies was The Women, a 1939 adaptation of Clare Boothe’s classic play about women and gossip, and how telling tales out of school derails the presumably happy marriage of Stephen Haines, an engineer, and his wife Mary, a non-working spouse. Boothe’s celebrated gimmick was that, though the story is almost entirely about men, no men are actually seen on stage or screen: just a cast of 135 women. Director George Cukor, who got assigned to the project after David O. Selznick fired him from Gone With the Wind (the film’s male star, Clark Gable, got paranoid that the Gay Cukor would take too much attention away from him and turn Gone With the Wind into a “women’s picture” and demanded Victor Fleming, Gable’s hunting buddy, replace him), took the piece’s gynocentrism to such extremes that he insisted that all the animals in the film be female and all the books in the characters’ libraries be by women authors. (He compromised in one particular, keeping in a scene from the play in which Mary Haines, played by Norma Shearer, reads an excerpt from The Prophet by male author Khalil Gibran. The original lines read, “Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing floor/Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.” But the Production Code Administration and its enforcer, Joseph Breen, demanded that the words “cover your nakedness” be struck from the quote.) The Women begins with an engaging credit sequence comparing the various leading characters to animals: Mary as a doe; Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford), the perfume saleswoman who seduces Stephen away from Mary, as a panting leopard; Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) as a snarling black cat; the four-times married Flora de Lave (Mary Boland) as a monkey; Miriam Aarons (Paulette Goddard), a chorus girl who’s after Sylvia’s husband, as a vixen (female fox); Peggy Day (Joan Fontaine), who faces a domineering husband named John even though she has more money than he does (due to a small income) as a lamb; Mary's mother, Mrs. Morehead (Lilian Watson), as an owl; Edith Potter (Phyllis Povah) as a cow chewing its cud; and Lucy (Marjorie Main), the tough, no-nonsense proprietress of the Nevada dude ranch where a number of the women repair to get their divorces, as a neighing horse.

The film’s script is credited to Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, in that order, but that wasn’t the sequence in which they worked on it. After a few other writers worked on the script, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (about whom my husband Charles, who watched parts of the film with me and who’s decidedly less of a Fitzgerald fan than I am, said it was the perfect story for him because it’s about a bunch of women who don’t have or need jobs) and Donald Ogden Stewart, Murfin took on the screenplay, threw out everything that had been written for it before, and wrote her own adaptation from scratch. Producer Hunt Stromberg was about to green-light this version for production when he looked it over and decided it wouldn’t work. He called in Anita Loos and told her, “We’ve had to take out all Clare Boothe’s dirty jokes, and now the script isn’t funny anymore.” Loos was assigned to come up with “clean jokes” to replace the dirty ones that had been sacrificed at the altar of the Production Code. The result was a feast of bitchery (though, once again by order of Joseph Breen, the word “bitch” couldn’t be used and the writers had to come up with the invented word “beezle” as its equivalent) on screen in which Crystal Allen (who, as Charles pointed out, was virtually the only woman besides Marjorie Main’s character who had a job!) manages to steal Mary’s husband away from her. Mary’s mom and daughter (Virginia Weidler, the superb child actress who a year later played the daughter of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story and did a spot-on Hepburn impersonation) both urge her to fight back, but instead Mary retreats to Reno to sit out the six-week residency Nevada law required and shed her erring husband once and for all. Among the film’s most delicious scenes are the ones taking place on the train from New York to Reno (which took three days then and now) in which Mary runs into Countess De Lave, Peggy Day, and Miriam Aarons. Much of the action of the film centers around a New York beauty salon and spa named Sidney’s (after MGM’s long-time makeup head, Sidney Guilaroff) whose manicurist, Olga (Dennie Moore), starts the gossip about Stephen and Crystal and unknowingly spills the beans to Mary herself, who’s come to the salon for the hottest new shade of nail polish, “Jungle Red.”

There’s an intriguing item on the film’s imdb.com “Trivia” page to the extent that, even though Crystal is portrayed as the villainess of the piece, Clare Boothe sympathized with her more than anyone else in the dramatis personae. That’s not a bit surprising given that Clare Boothe lived the Crystal Allen character arc for real; she seduced Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce from his first wife, married him, and stayed with him until Luce’s death. If anything, the real bad girl of the piece is Sylvia Fowler, who cheerily spreads bits of gossip around her circle of friends, heedless of what the bad news might do to them and their families, and when her own husband dumps her for a younger, hotter woman, we read that as just comeuppance. Rosalind Russell recalled years later that Cukor had told her to play the part with a light touch “because in this picture Sylvia’s breaking up a family, and there’s a child involved, and if you’re a heavy, audiences will hate you. Don't play it like a heavy, just be ridiculous.” Russell recalled later that “everything that came to me from 'The Women' –namely, my reputation as a comedienne – I owe to George. … He was marvelous to work for, he could think of a hundred bits of business for every moment." Russell said that working back-to-back for Cukor in The Women and Howard Hawks in His Girl Friday established her as a major star after mediocre assignments in the previous five years of her film career. (My favorite Cukor anecdote came from Jack Lemmon, who made his first film, It Should Happen to You, for Cukor. Lemmon’s character had one big scene in the film and he came in determined to act his pants off and throw himself into the role so all Hollywood would notice him. They shot the first take and Cukor said, “Less, Jack, less.” Lemmon turned it down a little, they shot the second take, and Cukor said, “Less, Jack, less.” They went through this a dozen times, with Lemmon turning it down a little more on each retake and Cukor saying, “Less, Jack, less.” Finally an exasperated Lemmon complained, “Look, if I give you any less, I won’t be acting at all!” “That’s right, Jack, that’s right,” Cukor said. To the end of his life Lemmon said that was the best advice he ever got from a director.)

Accounts differ as to how the actresses on the film got along and whether there were any tensions. Cukor decided to have three assistant directors call Shearer, Crawford, and Russell to the set at exactly the same time so none of the principals would feel they were being short-changed in favor of the others. (Shearer, Crawford, and Russell were all billed before the title, though Russell’s name was in letters 50 percent the size of Shearer’s and Crawford’s.) In her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, Joan Fontaine said of Cukor, “He handled all the women in the star-studded cast with tact and gallantry, so that what might have been a highly charged assignment for any other director turned out to be a happy association all around. We adored George, as do all actresses who work with him.” Yet there’s one story about Shearer and Crawford, who’d allegedly hated each other for years. Because Shearer had been married to MGM production chief Irving Thalberg for 12 years until his sudden death in 1936, Crawford had been ferociously jealous. She complained to her friends, “How can I compete with Norma? She sleeps with the boss!” Though their two characters in The Women meet in only one scene, that proved to have more than its share of fireworks. They shot the main scene as a master shot and then late in the evening Shearer returned to the set to shoot her close-ups. Crawford was there to feed her her lines, and to discomfit Shearer as much as possible Crawford brought along an afghan rug and the knitting needles and yarn she was using to make it. Crawford made so much noise with her needles that Shearer lost her temper and told Cukor, “You can send Crawford home and feed me her lines yourself.” The Women has been remade several times, including an ill-advised musical version from 1956 called The Opposite Sex that put the male characters on screen; an aborted version from 1960 called Gentlemen’s Club that would have reversed Clare Boothe’s gimmick and included only males on screen; and a 2008 remake under the original title directed and written by Diane English and starring Meg Ryan. (I’m guessing that one took a more feminist slant on the original than this one did.) The film ends in a confrontation sequence in which Mary Haines wins back Stephen’s love from the predatory Crystal, though Charles said he would have preferred an ending in which Mary says goodbye and good riddance to Stephen and establishes herself as a career woman independent of Stephen or any other man. Actually, that’s largely the part Norma Shearer had played in her Academy Award-winning film The Divorcée (1930)!