Cover Girl (Columbia, 1944)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 29) I caught two films in Turner Classic Movies’ “Summer Under the Stars” one-day tribute to Rita Hayworth. The films were Cover Girl (1944) and You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), both out-and-out musicals with major dancing stars in the male leads: Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich (and the immediate follow-up from 1942, You Were Never Lovelier: Astaire biographers Stanley Green and Burt Goldblatt joked in their book about the similarity of the “you … never” titles of these films) and Gene Kelly in Cover Girl. Columbia Pictures borrowed Kelly from MGM for Cover Girl and after that planned to co-star Hayworth and Kelly in an adaptation of Kelly’s stage hit Pal Joey (1940), but MGM wouldn’t give Kelly two loan-outs in a row and so the only recordings we have of Kelly in his star-making stage role are fragments of silent film shot by someone sneaking a movie camera into a theatre in 1940 and a private recording from 1973 of Kelly singing one of Joey’s signature songs, “I Could Write a Book.” (Columbia finally filmed Pal Joey in 1957 with Hayworth demoted from the younger to the older of the two female leads, Kim Novak as the younger and Frank Sinatra as Joey; it’s a disappointing movie, partly because the script was softened and partly because both Hayworth and Novak were given voice doubles whose singing voices didn’t sound at all like their speaking voices. Even Sinatra’s singing was recorded in such a different acoustic from his speaking that if you didn’t already know his voice, you’d have thought he was being doubled, too.) Cover Girl is a stunning movie in one respect: after a number of indifferent roles at MGM (Kelly had been brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, who intended to use him in straight non-musical dramatic roles; when Kelly demanded to do musicals as well and Selznick realized he didn’t have the infrastructure to make them, he transferred his contract to MGM), he got complete control over his choreography for this film and his spectacular dance numbers made him a star. Other than that, Cover Girl is a clunky mess of a film that illustrates my General Field Theory of Cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers. The writing credits of Cover Girl list Erwin Gelsey (also the author of the story source for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers Swing Time) for the story, Marion Parsonnet and Paul Gangelin for “adaptation,” and Virginia Van Upp for the screenplay, while imdb.com lists one John H. Kafka (presumably no relation) as an uncredited contributor. The director was Charles Vidor, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who two years later would direct Hayworth again in the classic film noir Gilda, one of her most iconic roles.

The story casts Hayworth as Rusty Parker, one of eight chorus girls working at a seedy Brooklyn nightclub owned by Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) and co-managed by him and his sidekick “Genius” (Phil Silvers). Rusty and Danny are in love, but their relationship is strained when Maurine Martin (Leslie Brooks), a fellow member of Danny’s chorus line, hears of a major contest being sponsored by Vanity magazine to recruit a cover girl for a special wedding issue. Vanity is published by John Coudair (Otto Kruger), who sees a photo of Rusty and immediately flashes back to a woman he briefly dated 40 years previously, Maribelle Hicks (also Rita Hayworth), who was also performing in a show when they met. Coudair (whose younger self is played by Jess Barker, who’s actually believable as a younger version of Otto Kruger) went as far as to propose marriage to Maribelle, but during the wedding ceremony she bolted and ended up with the piano player who’d always been her true love, giving up wealth and security for a poverty-stricken but love-rich future. Rusty wins the cover girl contest, which is sponsored by Coudair but actually run by his editor, Cornelia Jackson (Eve Arden, saltily effective as usual; she practically steals the movie on her own!). She also attracts the attentions of Broadway producer Noel Wheaton (Lee Bowman), who offers to star her in a Broadway show, also called Cover Girl, but makes it clear that marrying him is part of the deal. Rusty makes her Broadway debut in a big number that features various chorines playing cover girls: Jean Colleran (American), Francine Counihan (American Home), Helen Mueller (Collier’s), Ceceila Meagher (Coronet), Betty Jane Hess (Cosmopolitan), Dusty Anderson (Farm Journal), Eileen McClory (Glamour), Cornelia B. von Hessert (Harper’s Bazaar), Karen X. Gaylord (Liberty), Peggy Lloyd (Mademoiselle), Betty Jane Graham (McCall’s), Martha Outlaw (Redbook), Susann Shaw and Georgia Carroll (Vogue), Rose May Robson (Woman’s Home Companion), and the decidedly pre-pubescent (looking uncannily like Shirley Temple a decade earlier) Cheryl Archibald (Look). Rusty’s a success and agrees to marry Noel in the same house where her grandmother Maribelle bolted from her wedding to Coudair 40 years earlier, but after Coudair (who’s been assigned to give the bride away) tells her the story of Maribelle, Rusty likewise bolts her own wedding, flees to the piss-ant club in Brooklyn, and reunites with Danny at long last. (Frankly, I wish the writing committee could have come up with a way to have Rusty and Danny become Broadway stars together, since Danny obviously deserves success on the Main Stem.)

Oddly, there are other movies in which the business of having an intergenerational plot twist involving a chorus girl seeking a career in the same business as her direct ancestor was done more adroitly in Jessie Matthews’s British film It’s Love Again (1936), in which a young dancer tries to pass herself off as her own mother to gain stardom in London; and another Columbia film from four years later than Cover Girl: Ladies of the Chorus, the one fruit from Marilyn Monroe’s brief six-month stint at the studio, directed by Phil Karlson (who handled Monroe more adroitly than some of her later, bigger-name directors) from a story and script by Harry Sauber and Joseph Carole. Ladies of the Chorus is often lampooned because Adele Jergens, who played Monroe’s mother in the film, was only nine years older, but it’s an estimable film. It’s also noteworthy in that Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn allowed Monroe to do her own singing in the film, a privilege he never accorded Rita Hayworth. Rita recalled in interviews in the late 1960’s that Cohn spent a ton of Columbia’s money on voice teachers and coaches for her, but never let her sing for herself in this or any film; in Cover Girl she’s doubled by Martha Mears. Cohn spared no expense to make Cover Girl the equal of any major-studio production; he hired Jerome Kern to write the songs and Ira Gershwin to supply the lyrics. At least one song, “Put Me to the Test,” was originally a lyric Ira had written for one of his brother George’s songs, used in the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress, but the makers of that movie had used it exclusively as an instrumental (a dance between Fred Astaire, George Burns, and Gracie Allen with whiskbrooms) and Ira recycled his lyric and had Kern write a new melody for it. Cohn also budgeted the film to include three-strip Technicolor and got Rudolph Maté as the cinematographer, with Allen M. Davey as the ubiquitous “Technicolor consultant.” (Maté had shot Rita Hayworth in her film debut, under her true name Rita Cansino, doing a hot dance on a pleasure ship in the 1935 film Dante’s Inferno.) In the same late-1960’s interviews, Hayworth said that You’ll Never Get Rich, You Were Never Lovelier, and Cover Girl were her favorites of her own films, which suggests that she never really saw herself as an actress, but primarily a dancer. Cover Girl limps along to an all too predictable finish, and the scene in which Rusty returns to her Brooklyn redoubt and the man she really loves would have had far more impact if the voice doubling hadn’t been so obvious. The writing committee had worked out a plot in which Danny would recognize Rusty from hearing her sing their Big Song, “Long Ago and Far Away” (the one song from this movie that became a standard), which would have packed the emotional wallop the writers intended if either Rita had sung it herself or Columbia would have hired a voice double closer to Rita’s speaking voice than Martha Mears.

You'll Never Get Rich (Columbia, 1941)

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

After Cover Girl on Turner Classic Movies’ August 29 tribute to Rita Hayworth, they showed another Hayworth musical that despite a much cheaper production (it was shot in basic black-and-white, which ironically turned Hayworth’s famously dyed red hair back to its darker shade; she was black-haired au naturel, predictably given her Latina origins) was a better movie in every respect. The film was You’ll Never Get Rich, and it was better in all respects. It was directed by Sidney Lanfield, who’d had a career at 20th Century-Fox (where he made the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first film to star Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson) and would eventually make something of a comeback directing episodes of the mid-1960’s TV series The Addams Family. The writers were Michael Fessier and Ernest Pagano, and they came up with a Lubitsch-esque sex farce which casts Astaire as Robert Curtis, choreographer and star of a Broadway musical being produced by Martin Cortland (Robert Benchley). Unfortunately Cortland is a big-time philanderer who’s got eyes for a particular dancer in his chorus line, Sheila Winthrop (Rita Hayworth). Cortland has gone so far as to buy Sheila a diamond bracelet, while also palming his wife Julia (Frieda Inescort) off with a $7 Chinese back-scratcher he bought at the same jewelry store. When Julia pays an unexpected visit to Cortland’s office, she grabs the bracelet in a case from Martin’s basement and at first thinks it’s her 15th anniversary present, until she notices the inscription Cortland had put on it and sees it’s for someone named “Sheila” instead of her. Cortland says it was actually a present to Sheila from Robert Curtis, and the phony story gets blown up into a newspaper report that Sheila and Curtis are engaged. Naturally this pisses off Sheila’s actual boyfriend, servicemember Tom Barton (John Hubbard), and Sheila, Tom, and Sheila’s Aunt Louise (Ann Shoemaker) plan a joking reception for Curtis in which Tom will pose as Sheila’s revenge-minded brother and threaten Curtis with a gun. Just then Curtis receives a draft notice and decides to accept it, thinking that being in the Army will get him out from being either a patsy in Cortland’s attempts at extra-relational activity or a victim of Tom’s revenge plot. It doesn’t work out quite that way, as Curtis is assigned to Camp Weston (not coincidentally also the army camp Gene Kelly and Phil Silvers entertained the troops at during a brief gag sequence in Cover Girl), where naturally enough Tom is one of the commanding officers. There’s also a top sergeant played by Donald MacBride with all the delicacy and sensitivity which he played the furious hotel manager in the Marx Brothers’ film Room Service (that’s meant ironically), and a couple of fellow enlistees who become Curtis’s buddies, Kewpie Blain (Guinn “Big Boy” Williams) and a fast-talking nonsensical character called “Swivel Tongue” (Cliff Nazarro), whose lines start out as English and quickly become unintelligible in any language. There are some nice slapstick scenes which show that had he been born a decade earlier Fred Astaire, with his superb control over his body, could have become a quite formidable silent-era comedian.

You’ll Never Get Rich has a musical score by Cole Porter, whose numbers showed a rare (for him) flair for jazz. Astaire gets some quite hot numbers, including a great song called “Since I Kissed My Baby Goodbye” which he performs in the guardhouse (where he spends a lot of his time on base) with the Black vocal group the Delta Rhythm Boys, as well as an instrumental alternately called “Marche Milastaire” and “A-Stairable Rag” in which he dances with a Black jazz band featuring trumpeter Red Mack (who would later record a song called “If You Leave Me Baby” for Atlas Records on which he became one of the first singers to double-track his own voice), reedman Buddy Collette, and drummer Chico Hamilton (12 years before he’d become a major jazz star, first with the Gerry Mulligan quartet and then on his own). Working with African-Americans always brought out the best in Astaire; one recalls the great scene to “Slap That Bass” from the 1937 film Shall We Dance in which the song’s verse is performed by Mantan Moreland and then Astaire takes over for the chorus. You’ll Never Get Rich ends with Martin Cortland bringing his whole show to Camp Weston to entertain the troops and also hopefully to seduce his later would-be star dancer, Sonia (Osa Massen), for whom he’s changed the inscription on the diamond bracelet (ya remember the diamond bracelet?) from “Sheila” to “Sonia.” Not knowing this, Robert Curtis (ya remember Robert Curtis?) offers Sheila the bracelet as an engagement present, since Sheila has decided she’s really in love with Robert, only the change from “Sheila” to “Sonia” as the name on the bracelet convinces Sheila to go ahead with her original plan to marry Tom (ya remember Tom?) and ship out to Panama with him. Ultimately Robert double-crosses Sheila by secretly hiring a real justice of the peace (Frank Ferguson) to play the officiant in the big wedding number at the close of the camp show, so Robert and Sheila are actually legally married. A furious Sheila insists she’ll have it annulled, but Martin does his first selfless act in the whole movie and explains everything, so Robert and Sheila end up a legally wed couple headed for at least a modicum of happiness. You’ll Never Get Rich is a sheer delight start to finish, though it’s beset with some of those weird acts of cruelty Fred Astaire often committed in his movies (particularly the 1942 Holiday Inn) to get what he wanted romantically and/or sexually. It’s curious watching these two films back-to-back and realizing how much more entertaining You’ll Never Get Rich is even though it’s in black-and-white and is hardly as prestigious in budget. Incidentally Fred Astaire was originally reluctant to work with Rita Hayworth; he remembered appearing in vaudeville on the same bills as Rita’s father, Eduardo Cansino (and according to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Astaire had briefly taken dancing lessons from Hayworth’s paternal uncle). I was a bit surprised that Astaire let Hayworth wear high heels during their dance numbers together since Astaire was sensitive about his short stature and worried about doing dances with partners as tall as he was. But Astaire later said that of all his dance partners Hayworth was the quickest study; he could teach her a routine, then take a lunch break, and by the time lunch was over she knew the routine perfectly.

My Life Is Murder: "It Takes Two" (Greenstone Pictures, Acorn Pictures, DCD Rights, TVNZ1, Network 10, American Public Television; TV series episode, aired October 10, 2022)

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

Last night I caught up with My Life Is Murder, a genuinely charming if a bit offbeat TV detective series from New Zealand featuring Lucy Lawless as Alexa Crowe, a retired female police detective turned unofficial private investigator who helps the official police solve crimes. The series started in 2019 and the first season actually took place in Australia, with Lawless’s character, Alexa Crowe, paired up with detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). Then the show moved to New Zealand and Crowe’s partner/nemesis on the official police force became Harry Henare (Rawiri Jobe). The show that ran on KPBS was the third-season opener, “It Takes Two,” centered around a tango dancing school run by César Borges (Adam-Jon Fiorentino), a highly charismatic and sexy instructor with a penchant for seducing all the young, nubile female students. The school is actually owned by Eva Borges (Jennifer Ward-Leland), César’s mother, and among the students that have floated in and out of César’s bed is Hilary Morel (Kimberley Crossman). When another student with whom César had been having an affair with, Beatriz Delgado (Mikaela Rüegg), is found stabbed to death, Hilary is a prime suspect and so is Gavin Hartley (Dan Musgrove), an actor in a popular role-playing video game. Hilary claims to have been home alone the night of Beatrice’s murder, but Alexa deduces that while she was home, all right, she was having an affair with a married man, Reg (Mike Minogue) and the two spent the night together having sex largely, on her part at least, as a rebound relationship after César dumped her for Beatriz.

Alexa and Harry enroll in the tango class and pose as an engaged but not yet married couple, though that doesn’t stop César from putting the moves on Alexa (“I like older women,” he explains), which Alexa goes along with to get more information. Beatriz and her brother Francisco Delgado (Daniel Fernandez) turn out to be human-rights attorneys as well as tango students, and ultimately, after noticing an unusually scented oil on the knife used to stab Beatriz to death and then seeing César use that same sort of oil on a pair of steaks he was going to grill for Alexa, she deduces that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Eva Borges, who was not César’s biological mother at all. Instead she was a midwife at a prison run by the Argentinian military junta who ruled the country during the so-called “Dirty War” period from 1976 to 1983, and César was the son of one of the women prisoners in the establishment where Eva worked. When the junta fell she kidnapped César and high-tailed it to New Zealand, passing César off as her biological son. Ultimately Eva is arrested for the crime she committed on New Zealand soil and César is free to continue cutting his swath with all the hot young women in his tango class. I’d watched some of the previous episodes of My Life Is Murder from the first (2019) season that took place in Australia (and benefited from Bernard Curry being quite a bit more charismatic than Rawiri Jobe!), which I pretty much wrote off as “engaging if not ultimately very satisfying,” a description I’d give to this episode, too. I liked the character of Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans), a Native (Aborigine or Maori? It’s hard to tell since she was a running character in both the Australian and New Zealander phases of the show) assistant to Alexa who according to the show’s background page on Wikipedia was busted for computer hacking and paroled to Alexa in exchange for using her expertise to fight computer crime instead of committing it. Madison even has a pet cat, Chowder, who’s played by a feline named “Zeppelin” who actually gets a credit on the show.

The Little Foxes (Samuel Goldwyn Productions, RKO, 1941)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 27) I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Summer Under the Stars” all-day tribute to legendary mega-star Bette Davis: The Little Foxes (1941), made at the Samuel Goldwyn Studio in 1941 in what was Davis’s second and last loan-out during her 18-year period as a contract player for Warner Bros. The first had come in 1934 when RKO borrowed her for the bitch role of waitress Mildred Rogers in the film of W. Somerset Maugham’s largely autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage, a part Davis had to fight for because the conventional wisdom in Hollywood then was that male stars could have long and prosperous careers as villains – Erich von Stroheim was famously billed as “The Man You Love to Hate” – but the only way a woman could have similarly enduring success was if she only played characters the audience could like. Davis pleaded with Jack Warner for the role of Mildred, and after weeks of fighting her Warner finally gave in and told Davis, “O.K., go ahead and hang yourself.” Davis returned to Warners after Bondage a much bigger star than before, and one of the “suits” at Warners said, “RKO knew what kind of girl she really was!” By 1941 Davis was literally the highest-paid woman in America and, after a nasty fight with Warner Bros. in which she tried to break her contract by fleeing to Britain, lost the battle but effectively won the war, she’d established her reputation playing precisely the sort of bitch roles from which Jack Warner had tried to warn her against. Davis got the part in The Little Foxes thanks to one man: Sgt. Alvin C. York, who had sold Warner Bros. the rights to his life story of overcoming his Quaker pacifism to become America’s most decorated hero in World War I. York’s contract with Warners gave him approval rights over the actor who would play him, and he soon made it clear to Jack Warner that Gary Cooper was the only actor whom he’d approve. Since Cooper was under contract to Goldwyn, the only way Warner Bros. could get him for Sergeant York was to cut a major loan-out deal to give Goldwyn Bette Davis for The Little Foxes.

The Little Foxes had begun as a play by Lillian Hellman, who was working for Goldwyn as a screenwriter under a contract that also gave Goldwyn first right of refusal for anything she wrote for the theatre. The film's title comes from Chapter 2, Verse 15 of the Song of Solomon in the King James version of the Bible, which reads, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes." (In 1945 the other half of that quote, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, was used as a movie title, directed by Roy Rowland from a script by Dalton Trumbo based on a 1940 novel by George Victor Martin, starring Edward G. Robinson and Agnes Moorehead as a Norwegian immigrant farmer couple in Wisconsin.) Producer Samuel Goldwyn could never remember the title of the film correctly; he kept calling it The Three Little Foxes, perhaps confusing it with the Walt Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs (1933). The Little Foxes was produced on Broadway by Herman Shumlin and starred Tallulah Bankhead as Regina Hubbard Giddens, avaricious bitch goddess of the small town of Paltou, Alabama (called “Bowden” in Hellman’s 1946 prequel, Another Part of the Forest). Goldwyn assigned William Wyler to direct the film, which made sense because Wyler had previously directed Davis in two of her biggest hits at Warners, Jezebel (1938) – which won her her second Academy Award – and The Letter (1940). Wyler advised Davis to go to New York and see Bankhead’s performance as Regina before he shot the movie. Davis originally didn’t want to because she didn’t want her performance to be affected by Bankhead’s, but once she saw Bankhead play the part she insisted that Bankhead’s interpretation was the only possible one. During the shoot of The Little Foxes Davis and Wyler continually argued, always over the same issue: Wyler would say things like, “I want you to give Regina some depth instead of playing her as just a one-dimensional bitch,” and Davis would reply, “But Willy, Lillian Hellman wrote her as a one-dimensional bitch!” They also argued over Davis’s use of rice-flour makeup and calamine lotion on her face to make herself look older and uglier. (One of the big things I admire about Bette Davis is her willingness to make herself look ugly if she felt a role required it.) In one clever scene, Regina looks at an old photo of herself (almost certainly a stock still left over from an earlier Bette Davis film) and compares it to what her mirror reveals of her current appearance.

The film’s screenplay, which Hellman adapted herself with help from Arthur Kober (to whom she’d been briefly married in the 1920’s), Dorothy Parker, and Parker’s husband Alan Campbell, softened the story by adding one character, David Hewitt (Richard Carlson), a nice guy who works as a reporter for the local Paltou paper and becomes the boyfriend of Regina’s daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright in her film debut) after Alexandra rejects her family’s pressure on her to marry her first cousin Leo Hubbard (Dan Duryea in a marvelously twitchy performance that anticipates the great villains he would play for Fritz Lang in Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street). Regina’s husband, Horace Giddens (Herbert Marshall, reunited with Davis from the cast of The Letter, in which they also played a dysfunctional couple), is off in a Baltimore sanitarium where he’s recovering from heart disease. Regina is being pressured by her brothers Ben (Charles Dingle) and Oscar (Carl Benton Reid) to bring Horace home so he, Ben, and Oscar can put up the money to fund a northern investor, William Marshall (Russell Hicks) from Chicago, who wants to build a cotton mill in Paltou so instead of shipping the raw cotton to New England they can mill it in Paltou and take advantage of the ultra-cheap Southern labor. Regina ultimately sends daughter Alexandra to fetch her father and bring him home so she can get the money from him and invest in the mill that will make all three Hubbards millionaires. Only when Alexandra finally brings him back, Horace is appalled by the proposal; at one point Marshall boasts that the governor of Alabama has given them the water rights needed for the mill to work, and Horace says, “Were they his to give?” (The Little Foxes is studded throughout with Hellman’s and her co-writers’ digs at the evils of capitalism.) Regina continues to browbeat Horace into giving her the money to invest in the mill, and Horace continues to refuse until, in the film’s most famous scene, he has another heart attack and breaks the bottle of his all-important medicine as he’s trying to serve himself the spoonful of it which will save his life. Realizing that there’s another bottle of it in his bedroom upstairs, Horace tries to crawl up the stairs to fetch it, but Regina impassively watches him and doesn’t try to help him until it’s already too late to save him.

This follows an argument between them over $75,000 in Union Pacific bonds, which Horace had bought when they were virtually worthless and held on to as the company became successful and the worth of its bonds soared. Only the bonds, which Horace kept in a safety deposit box at his bank, were stolen by his scapegrace nephew Leo, Oscar’s son, who turned them over to his father Oscar and his uncle Ben to finance the mill without Horace’s or Regina’s involvement. Though Horace wasn’t expected to inspect the bonds until a few months later when it was time to claim his dividend coupons, he’s so disgusted at the pressure from Regina that he contacts his attorney and says he wants to change his will to disinherit Regina and leave all his money to their daughter Alexandra. As part of his plan, he takes the safety-deposit box home with him and notices that the bonds are missing. Horace correctly deduces what happened to them and announces that in his new will, he will declare that he merely loaned Regina the bonds, so Regina will get only the value of the stolen bonds, which will lock her out of any profit share in the mill. This gives Regina a powerful motive for wanting Horace dead, and when he finally croaks she announces to her brothers that her price for keeping silent about Leo’s transgressions will be a 75 percent share in the mill instead of the 40 percent to which she’d previously agreed. Disgusted by her mother’s avaricious attitude and callousness towards her father, Alexandra leaves town with David (in the play there was no David and she left alone) and Regina, in a haunting close-up, is left super-rich but alone and psychologically and morally devastated. (It’s quite remarkable that in a film made while the Motion Picture Production Code was in full force and effect, Regina was allowed literally to get away with murder at the end.)

The Little Foxes was photographed by Gregg Toland, who when it started shooting had just come off of his work on Orson Welles’s first film, Citizen Kane. He continued his work on so-called “deep focus” that he had pioneered on Kane, which meant using long lenses and ultra-fast film to increase the depth of field and have foreground and background objects in focus simultaneously. Bette Davis was appalled at the sheer amount of light Toland was using on the set to get these effects, and became convinced it was his attempt to embarrass her (though this seems odd given that she was simultaneously arguing with her director over a makeup designed to make her look uglier!). Seen today, The Little Foxes seems like a powerful movie attacking the evils of capitalism in general – one of the Hubbard brothers even delivers a speech towards the end in which he predicts that someday people like him will rule the world, which seems oddly prescient in the Age of Trump – and particularly the devastating effects of greed on the people who possess it and use it as an excuse for their actions. My husband Charles and I had watched it before, though on that occasion I had prefaced it with Lillian Hellman’s prequel, Another Part of the Forest (made at Universal in 1948, based on Hellman’s 1946 play), which may have weakened the impact of this quite remarkable film. (Dan Duryea, who played Leo in The Little Foxes, appeared as Leo’s father Oscar in the film of Another Part of the Forest, with Fredric March as Marcus Hubbard, father of Oscar, Ben, and Regina, and March’s real-life wife Florence Eldridge as Marcus’s wife Lavinia.)

Bury Me Dead (Benjamin Stoloff Pictures, PRC, 1947)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 23) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube showing of a 1947 film from PRC called Bury Me Dead (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzFgrVk86p0) that was an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying combination of romantic melodrama, screwball comedy, and film noir. Bury Me Dead started life in 1946 as a radio play by Irene Winston for a short-lived anthology series called Molle Mystery Theatre before PRC producer Charles F. Riesner (who’d briefly worked as an assistant to Charlie Chaplin in the early 1920’s; among the Chaplin films he worked on was 1922’s The Pilgrim, in which Riesner cast his son Dean as a bratty kid who bedevils Chaplin; years later Dean Riesner grew up to be a screenwriter whose most famous credit was Dirty Harry: Chaplin and Clint Eastwood, one degree of separation!) bought the rights and made it into a movie a year later. The film’s credits included John Alton as cinematographer (always a good sign) and Bernard Vorhaus as director, while Dwight V. Babcock (also the name of the principal villain in Auntie Mame) and Karen DeWolf turned Winston’s radio play into a screenplay. They also filled it so full of flashbacks they seemed to be worshiping at the shrine of St. Casey Robinson (Casey Robinson was a screenwriter notorious for doing flashbacks within flashbacks), though Charles said it reminded him of Christopher Nolan’s Inception (not one of his better films).

Bury Me Dead begins with one of the most provocative premises ever cooked up for a film: we see a stock shot of a building burning down, and we soon learn it’s the horse stable of Barbara Carlin (June Lockhart), a well-to-do woman married to a not-so-well-to-do man named Rod Carlin (Mark Daniels). Barbara Carlin is presumed to have died in the fire, and she’s given a fancy funeral at which Rod and a family friend, attorney Michael Dunn (Hugh Beaumont, best known as the father on the TV series Leave It to Beaver), are among the mourners. Also on deck for the funeral is a mystery woman dressed in black, with a black veil across her face. She gets into a cab driven by character actor Sumner Getchell, and when he asks whose funeral she has just attended, she says, “Mine.” It turns out the body in the burned stable was too charred to be identifiable and Rod made the I.D. on the basis of some jewelry the corpse had been wearing, including a necklace and a compact inscribed with an ambiguous legend about somebody loving someone else. So it becomes not only a whodunit but a whodidtheydunitto as the surviving characters, including Barbara, try to figure out just who the impossibly mangled corpse they buried in Barbara’s place was. At first suspicion settles on “Rusty” Carlin (Cathy O’Donnell, inexplicably top-billed), whom everybody had assumed was Barbara’s adopted sister until on the death of Barbara’s dad it was revealed that dad never completed the adoption and therefore she’s no legal relation at all and isn’t entitled to any share of dad’s estate. Out of pity Barbara offers her an allowance, which “Rusty” steadfastly refuses, though she stays on the estate and moves into a guest house that formerly housed a woman horse trainer. There’s also a flashback sequence in which “Rusty” is shown romantically involved with a musclebound boxer named George Mandley (Greg McClure, who though not drop-dead gorgeous is sufficiently impressive as a hunk of man-meat the many shots of him clad only in Everlast boxing trunks and shoes are fun to look at) who’s also dating his supposed “secretary,” Helen Lawrence (Sonia Darrin), the closest this film gris has to a femme fatale.

Barbara is determined to break up “Rusty” and George, especially since “Rusty” is underage, and she manages to do that by showing her George making love to Helen – only Barbara’s husband Rod (ya remember Rod?) is also sexually involved with Helen, while Barbara herself has a brief fling with George. It turns out that “Rusty” is still alive and the real woman who burned in the barn is Helen, who had tried on one of Barbara’s necklaces at Rod’s behest and had gone to her death while wearing it. For the second half of the movie the writers dispense with the dramatized flashbacks (though they still have the characters narrate stories about their pasts) and it all leads up to an ending in which [spoiler alert!] the real killer, who not only crushed Helen’s skull with a hammer and then set the barn on fire so her death would look like an accident but also attacked Barbara in her home with a fireplace poker, is the attorney Michael Dunn. He was worried that if Rod and Barbara divorced, Michael’s financial ripoffs of the Carlin estate would come to light in the settlement negotiations, so he was determined to kill Barbara to conceal his financial crimes. There’s a marvelously cynical scene in which Rod is being held by a squad of police officers and given a third-degree interrogation while he pleads with the police to take him to the Carlin home where he’s become convinced Barbara is in mortal danger from Michael. In the end Michael is shot, first by “Rusty,” who finds Michael’s gun on the floor of the Carlin living room and shoots him to save Barbara’s life; and then by the real cops, who arrived just in time to finish Michael off. Early on I joked that this would be an appropriate movie for Lifetime to remake, since there are enough sexual intrigues in enough different directions this would be good fodder for a Lifetime producer.

Cathy O’Donnell had a sad career; she was under contract to Sam Goldwyn, who in 1948 lent both her and Farley Granger out to RKO (which was Goldwyn’s distributor at the time) for her one truly great film in a leading role, Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night. Unfortunately she fell in love with and married Robert Wyler, director William Wyler’s brother, and Goldwyn was so angry with William Wyler for having run out his contract and leaving for greener pastures that he demanded O’Donnell and Robert Wyler divorce. When O’Donnell refused, Goldwyn fired her. She spent the rest of her career mostly working on television, though William Wyler occasionally gave his sister-in-law minor parts in his big movies. O’Donnell died in 1970 at age 46 after a long battle with cancer. Leonard Maltin in his Classic Movie Guide gave Bury Me Dead three stars out of five; he had good words for Alton’s stunning cinematography (even though all too much of the movie takes place outdoors during bright sunlight and therefore there were too few opportunities for Alton to work his noir magic) but dissing the film for its “talky treatment and abundance of light comedy.” The light comedy comes mostly from two servant characters, maid Mrs. Haskins (Virginia Farmer), who comes off like she went to the Judith Anderson School of Housekeeping; and butler Waters (Milton Parsons, who turned in some great campy supporting performances in RKO’s four mid-1940’s Dick Tracy movies but here just seems out of place. One also wonders just what PRC’s casting directors were thinking when they tried to turn Hugh Beaumont first into a noir hero in their short-lived Michael Shayne series and then into a noir villain here. He’s just too milquetoast a personality to fit in cinema’s dark side as it existed in the mid- to late-1940’s.

The Babysitter's Double Life (Storyteller Studios, Studio TF1 America, Blackstar, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 22) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime which I’d seen listed on their Web site and whose titles had intrigued me: The Babysitter’s Double Life and Her Husband’s Double Life. The Babysitter’s Double Life was directed by Lisa France from a script by Ashley O’Neil and was so close to the previous Lifetime film Babysitter’s Black Book (2015), directed by Lee Friedlander from a script by Richard Kletter and Michele Samit, it almost counted as a remake (and Lifetime did France and O’Neil no favors by re-running Babysitter’s Black Book just before The Babysitter’s Double Life). The central character of The Babysitter’s Double Life is Lia Collins (Courtney Fulk), who’s a senior at the prestigious (and expensive) Rossmore College whose business professor, Rosen (Josie Davis), is pressing her to come up with a plan for a startup as part of the class assignment. Lia hits on the idea of running a combination babysitter and “companionship” service for single parents who are lonely without their exes around. Lia is already working as a babysitter for Ethan Harlan (Cole Gerdes) and being paid in cash (two $100 bills for each night she works) when suddenly her scholarship to Rossmore is revoked because she failed to disclose her babysitting income on her application. So she’s desperate to make more money to stay in school and pay off the back tuition Rossmore is billing her for, and to do that she puts her combination babysitting/companionship business in operation. Ethan offers to back her financially and give her advice, and in a scene that’s quite chilling he gives her a Rolex watch and then she yields to his seduction in a nicely done soft-core porn scene. The makers of The Babysitter’s Double Life made the same mistake that the makers of Babysitter’s Black Book and Lifetime’s other movies around this premise have: they make the men who the teenage girls end up prostituting themselves to so genuinely attractive one gets the impression they’d want to have sex with them even without being paid to do so.

Lia recruits various nubile classmates of hers, including her Black best friend Kenzie (Kennie Nicole) and Tessa Holloway (Sophie Teasell), whom Lia assigns to Ethan’s best friend Greg (Brock Vickers). Kenzie righteously refuses to have sex with her clients but others in Lia’s posse, including Tessa, agree to do so in exchange for bigger payouts – which Lia accepts on a don’t-ask don’t-tell basis and keeps a second set of books in which to account them. One of the ways Ethan tricked Lia into having sex with him is by telling her he was going through a “trial separation” from his wife Annabelle (Katie Dallas), and Ethan’s kids have genuinely bonded with Lia. Unfortunately for Lia, Ethan is lying in more ways than one; not only are he and Annabelle still very much a couple, but Ethan is not filthy rich as he’s claimed. In fact, he owes $7 million in debt to various creditors, and Lia catches on when her supposedly expensive Swiss watch stops working. She looks it up online and discovers that if it stops working that soon, it’s a fake. Ethan tells her he deliberately palmed off a fake watch on her because she hadn’t yet “earned” a real one, but that causes Lia to do a clandestine search of Ethan’s business records and she discovers all the dunning letters he’s getting from his creditors. Lia also discovers the videos Ethan has filmed of his previous babysitters, all of whom he’s seduced and all of whom look strikingly like Lia. She tries to copy them onto a flash drive so she’ll have evidence against Ethan, but Ethan gets an alert on his own phone from a different location that an unknown device has logged on to his computer. Ethan immediately begins deleting his video files faster than Lia can copy them.

There’s another plot strand involving Lia’s friend Tessa, who mysteriously disappears right after a date with Greg. Tessa had previously called Lia and asked not to be assigned to Greg again on the ground that Greg was becoming dangerously obsessed with her, but Ethan assured Lia that he’d talk to Greg and ensure that nothing untoward happened to Tessa. Only Greg and Tessa got into a fight, Greg accidentally killed her, and dumped first her car and then her body. Lia finds the car with the help of her age-peer boyfriend Jace (the genuinely cute if not drop-dead gorgeous Drake Piscione), who’s worked out his own startup involving setting up security cameras to track the location of animals in semi-urban areas so they don’t become roadkill. But it’s not until an unrelated hiker discovers Tessa’s body in the park where Greg dumped her that the whole plot unravels. Ethan morphs from just a horny rich (or presumably rich) scumbag into a full-fledged Lifetime villain, while Lia hooks up with Annabelle, who fortunately made copies of all Ethan’s incriminating videos and saved them to a flash drive of her own. Ethan attempts to kill Lia but fortunately she’s saved by Jace and the police, who arrest him. (I was expecting – and fearing – an ending in which the young women get nailed while the men go scot-free, which is how it usually works in real life, but fortunately Ashley O’Neil didn’t go there.) I was amused at the ads shown during this film for subscriptions to Lifetime’s “streaming” service, the Lifetime Movie Network (LMN), which advertised the movies as being “as unpredictable as life itself.” That struck me as odd because a major part of the appeal of Lifetime movies is their utter predictability, the sense you have while watching them that you’re ahead of the filmmakers at every plot turn, and even when they try to throw in a “surprise” twist, it’s from a very shallow well of plot devices and clichés and you’ll still be able to predict just where this plot is going.

Her Husband's Double Life (Five Bridges Entertainment, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

After The Babysitter’s Double Life I watched the very similarly titled Her Husband’s Double Life, an intriguing title because the main “pussy in peril” this time is not the legal wife of the male lead but simply his fiancée. She’s Carrie Morgan (Tanisha Thammavongsa), a paramedic, who in the opening scene is finally receiving a marriage proposal from her boyfriend Timothy Blake (Jordan Van Dyck) after they’ve been living together for three years and have bought a house together. Only just after she accepts his ring, she’s called to the scene of an auto accident along with her work partner Nina Lopez (Shanna Armogan), who despite her Latina last name presents as Black, so I feared she was going to end up as The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Stumbles Onto the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her. (Fortunately, she didn’t.) Much to Carrie’s surprise, the victim is Timothy, and no sooner have she and Nina brought Timothy to the local emergency room (the film is set in Philadelphia) than she’s confronted by a family she had no idea Timothy had. They consist of Brianna Blake (Sarah Cleveland), Timothy’s legal wife of 20 years; their grown daughter Sophie (Anastasiya Filimonova); and Timothy’s mother Laurel (Toni Ellwand). The Blakes have ordered that no one who isn’t part of Timothy’s “immediate family” be admitted to see him, and since Carrie doesn’t qualify as such she’s barred from his room. Then we get a mysterious shot of someone sneaking into Timothy’s room and injecting his IV with some sort of nefarious substance that’s potentially lethal to him. The substance turns out to be insulin, which is fatal to Timothy since he wasn’t diabetic, and the doctors are unable to revive him in time. The Philadelphia police assign the case, once it’s officially ruled a homicide, to Detective Kyle Logan (Justin Nurse), who just happens to have dated Carrie before she hooked up with Timothy. In order to get more information on Timothy, Carrie befriends Timothy’s brother Noah (Ash Catherwood, a tall, rail-thin actor who didn’t look that much like Jordan Van Dyck, but he was dressed in sufficiently tight blue jeans and flashed a nice enough basket I didn’t care!), only when she pays a visit to Noah’s home she finds him stabbed to death on his kitchen floor.

By then Carrie has established enough of a modus vivendi with Brianna and Laurel that she’s permitted in their home, though daughter Sophie still hates her and doesn’t want to be in the same room with her. It’s established that Timothy was able to get away with having a wife and a fiancée because he was an airline pilot who frequently made transcontinental flights, so his work responsibilities kept him away from both homes a lot and provided him with a ready-made excuse he could tell the members of one household while he was in the other. In fact, once we learned that Timothy’s and Noah’s father had been a real-estate developer and had hoped his sons would follow him into that business, but they bailed on it and Timothy became an airline pilot instead, I wondered if writer Audrey C. Marie had got that plot point from the Trumps: Donald’s father, Fred Trump, had been a real-estate developer and landlord in the outer boroughs of New York City and his oldest son, Fred Trump, Jr., bailed on the family business and became an airline pilot. Marie and director Roxanne Boisvert keep us in a fair amount of suspense as to who the murderer is going to be; for a while they seem to be pointing towards Sophie, who’s seen breaking into Carrie’s home, breaking the glass frame of a photo of Carrie with Timothy, and stealing one of Timothy’s shirts that Carrie had been sleeping with as a form of consolation. We’re also thrown Nina as another red herring when she shows up at Carrie’s home carrying the same ornate handbag the mystery woman who confronted Timothy about his affairs in a security video from a coffeehouse which Detective Logan showed Carrie was holding.

In the end the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Detective Logan, who was jealous of Timothy for having got Carrie and also hated him because his father had had affairs with other women (the “C”-word is used in the dialogue) and he didn’t want to see Carrie get caught up in a relationship with someone who was already married. Detective Logan gives the game away when he talks about a man named Victor whom Carrie briefly dated between breaking up with him and taking up with Timothy. Logan says he heard about Victor from Nina, but Nina insists via an audio text message she sends to Carrie that she never talked about Victor to Logan. (I should have known that the hunkiest guy in the cast would turn out to be the bad guy: that’s an all too common Lifetime trope, even though Ash Catherwood did a lot more for me as a lust object than Justin Nurse did!) There’s an exciting climax in which Logan insists that he’s going to kill anyone who comes between him and Carrie; the two fight on the ground and Logan’s gun slips out of its holster; and Brianna Blake, of all people, grabs Logan’s gun and drills him with it, killing him. The film ends with an uncertain reunion between Carrie and Brianna, though Sophie still isn’t reconciled to the situation, and Carrie decides to leave her work as a paramedic to organize a foundation to offer psychological support to people in similarly emotionally discombobulated situations.

The whole film reminded me of The Bigamist, a quite good 1953 thriller directed by Ida Lupino and starring her and Joan Fontaine as Edmond O’Brien’s two wives. The Bigamist’s writers, Lawrence B. Marcus and Lou Schor, made O’Brien’s character a man who was frequently out of town on business and who drifted into bigamy when one of his wives turned out to be infertile while the other one actually conceived a child with him. In that case the plot unraveled (in both senses) when he and the infertile wife tried to adopt a child together and the whole scheme got discovered by the agents of the adoption agency doing their standard background check. Though the actual memorial service for Timothy is not shown, there’s dialogue explaining that Brianna doesn’t want Carrie to come but Carrie insists on going anyway, agreeing to sit in the back and not speak to anyone who was connected to Timothy via his life with Brianna. That reminded me of the story about how when Spencer Tracy died in 1967, his longtime partner Katharine Hepburn refused to go to his funeral because she thought that was the place for his estranged wife Louise and their children. Overall, though, Her Husband’s Double Life was a bit of a disappointment, hardly the slice of good clean sleazy fun the title kinda-sorta promised, though if my husband Charles had seen it with me (he was late coming home from work last night because he gave a co-worker a ride home and got back just at the point where Det. Logan was about to be revealed as the killer) he’d have definitely approved of its message against extra-relational activity!