by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other film on the program,
Brave New Jersey, was a real charmer! It
was based on the October 30, 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast of The War of
the Worlds, which Welles produced as part
of his Mercury Theatre on the Air
series of radio dramas and which famously fooled people into thinking that the
invasion was really happening because Welles and his co-writer, Howard Koch
(who’s listed in the credits of this film as the sole writer of the broadcast —
Welles was as upset by that as he was by the claim made by Pauline Kael and
others that Herman Mankiewicz was the sole writer of Citizen Kane; he said that Koch had helped with the second part of the
script but his contributions to the first part needed extensive revision)
framed the events of Wells’ novel as if they were happening in real time and
moved the setting from England to the U.S. — specifically the town of Grover’s
Mill, New Jersey (cited in an in-joke in the final credits to Timothy Hines’ The
War of the Worlds: The True Story, which
say that shortly after the events of the film, Bertie Wells and his wife
emigrated to the U.S. and settled in,
you guessed it, Grover’s Mill, New Jersey). Directed by Jody Lambert
(whom I’ll call “they” because no online source I’ve seen specifies whether
they’re a man or a woman) from a script they co-wrote with Michael Dowling, Brave
New Jersey is set in the decidedly
fictional town of Lullaby, New Jersey, just two miles from Grover’s Mill. The
name “Lullaby” is a masterstroke on the part of Lambert and Dowling because it
lets us know right away that this is a “sleepy” small town where nothing
exciting ever happens. The biggest news in Lullaby in years is that a local
farmer has just invented a contraption called a “Rotolactor,” an automatic
milking machine that supposedly can milk 15 cows at once. (There’s a nice scene
in which a man is shown drinking milk, realizing it’s sour and spitting it out
again — and we’re obviously meant to assume that this milk was produced with
the Rotolactor.)
On the night of October 30, 1938 the town’s mayor, Clark Hill
(Tony Hale), is scheduled to host a ceremony that will feature the unveiling and
first exhibition of the Rotolactor — which looks like a giant merry-go-round
for cows — in action, only the first time they turn on the Rotolactor in
rehearsal the control board shorts out and they have to pour water on the
machine to get it to stop. Clark Hill also has an unrequited crush on local
housewife Lorraine Davison (Heather Burns), who on his recommendation is
reading the novel Gone with the Wind
(an obvious in-joke since the film of Gone with the Wind starred Clark Gable!), while unbeknownst to Lorraine, her
husband Paul (Sam Jaeger) is receiving love notes from an out-of-town woman
named Margaret. The Davisons have a daughter, Ann (Grace Kaufman), who’s shown
wearing a fancy gown obviously too big for her — it’s her Hallowe’en costume,
and mom says, “You look just like Bette Davis.” “I’m supposed to be Garbo!” she retorts. The Davisons have also taken in a distant
relative from Poland, a kid named Ziggy (Harp Sandman), whose family sent him
to the U.S. to keep him away from the Nazis — they wouldn’t invade Poland until
1939 but I guess we’re supposed to think his parents realized the danger they
were facing and sent him to their American relatives a year early — and who
speaks absolutely no English. He and Amy get caught outside — he’s been dressed
as Abraham Lincoln for Hallowe’en despite, of course, having no knowledge who
that was — and get caught up in a prank by the neighbor kids to throw water
balloons filled with piss at the town’s reclusive old man, Ambrose P. Collins
(Raymond J. Barry), who it turns out commanded a unit in a crucial battle in
World War I, received a medal from President Wilson personally, and ever since
then has been locked in his house with his memories looking for a chance to get
into action again. (The whole plot line with him being targeted by the
prankster kids seemed straight out of the “Mr. Brauckoff” Hallowe’en scene in Meet
Me in St. Louis.) There’s also a nice
young woman, Helen Holbook (Erika Alexander) with an overbearing fiancé, Chardy
Edwards (Matt Olberg), and Sparky (Evan Jonigkeit), the town “bad boy” he
catches her necking with after she’s turned down Chardy’s
the-world-is-about-to-end-anyway-so-let’s-fuck-now-while-we-still-have-the-chance
pass.
In the end, the pranksters turn the switch to the Rotolactor, which not
only sets it on fire but triggers the fireworks that were supposed to
commemorate it, which Captain Collins and his motley crew — including the
predictably hapless town sheriff (Mel Rodriguez) — “read” as the Martian attack
and charge, while the local minister, Reverend Ray Rogers (Dan Bakkedahl),
sailed his collection plate through his church like a Frisbie and interpreted
that as a sign that the Martians were coming not to conquer the world, but to mediate man’s conflicts and
bring us peace. Lambert and Dowling threw a few modern expressions into their
dialogue, including “time frame” and “inappropriate” as a response from a woman
receiving an unwanted pass from a man (in 1938 a woman turning down a crude
advance would likely have chewed out the guy by saying, “You’re a masher!,” a
bit of 1930’s slang incomprehensible to most modern audiences), but for the
most part Brave New Jersey is a richly
allusive (I especially liked the town meeting in the church that seemed cribbed
from the one in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles), entertaining movie. About the only thing that rubbed me
the wrong way was the use of a modern-day folk-rock musical score — built
around a song the hapless Clark Hill writes as a love ballad for Lorraine
Davison, which is heard in his own inept rendition during the movie (with Tony
Hale forgetting that he had to move his hand down the fretboard of his guitar
to look like he was really playing it)
and in a fully professional version (but with Tony Hale this time turning in a
decent vocal performance) over the closing credits. I think the film would have
been more effective with a 1930’s-style musical score than a modern one, but
otherwise Brave New Jersey is a
one-joke movie but one which doesn’t overstay its welcome and depicts the War
of the Worlds broadcast panic — which has
been the subject of fictional made-for-TV movies as well as documentaries — in
a light-hearted screwball-comedy manner.
