by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night CBS-TV presented the 2020 Black Entertainment Television (BET) awards show — the first one I’ve seen since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic upended the world and suddenly banned large gatherings of people under the same roof (unless you’re President Trump, who can hold all the large gatherings he wants and subject people to viral exposure while having them sign a release that they won’t sue him if they get it) — and given that it took place in the middle of not only the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic but also the turmoil over the George Floyd killing and the sheer number of police murders of unarmed Black people and other people of color, the show buzzed with righteous anger that came forth mostly from the rappers on the program. Once again I’m forced to rely on my hastily scribbled notes to determine who performed what and what the songs’ titles were — unlike the producers of the Global Citizen telecast, the people in charge of this one didn’t bother with chyrons telling you who the perfomers were or what their songs were called — but the show actually had a host, a raucous Black woman stand-up artist named Amanda Seales who threw out a lot of anti-racist zingers, some of which were well targeted and some of which weren’t. The opening number was by a rapper named (I think) Kreton Bryant, who did something I presume was called “I Just Want to Live (God Protect Me),” which segued into a cover of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” (a lot less appealing with the full panoply of noises that back rap songs than it had been on the ABC-TV special from 2017 rebroadcast last June 24 when it was just read and I could appreciate it as racially charged poetry without having to strain to hear the words through the din of various “scratching” sound effects and “sampling” that back most rap records and all too often drown out the words) by original Public Enemy Chuck D. and, of all people, Ice-T. I had an “Is that … ?” moment when I first recognized his voice and then his face, completing his bizarre career trajectory from being a rapper whose most famous song was “Cop Killer” to playing a cop in his long-running role on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and now once again playing the voice from the ’hood denouncing law enforcement for how it targets Black people.
Then came a performer whose name I wrote down as Ronnie Riggs doing something called “All I Really Want to Know” and John Legend finding a reserve of raw power I never suspected he had in him on a song called “We Will Never Break.” Most awards shows are retrospectives of the past year, but this one was immediate; the up side of the way the artists were obliged to create music videos of their appearances instead of being able to perform “live” is they were able to create new songs for the show, and not surprisingly a lot of the material touched on SARS-CoV-2, police murders of Black people, or both. Indeed, so much of the material was socially conscious it was surprising whenever an artist came on and did a song that wasn’t! Next up was a number by Masego called “Queen Tings” which I recall as a surprisingly lyrical fusion of singing and rapping (a lot of rappers these days are incorporating actual musical pitches, doing a form of Black Sprechsgesang that, at least to me, makes them more tolerable than out-and-out rappers, especially since the people who do that tend to use actual live instruments as their backing instead of the insane burbles, scratches and other noises that traditionally accompany rap.) After that a brother act named Dr. Snake and Sir — one sings, one raps — did “We Need to Let Go” with a quite nice vocal contribution by a woman who turned out to be Jolene Brosche (once again I’m only guessing at a lot of these names since they weren’t shown as chyrons on the screen), Dr. Snake’s wife.
Then came one of the most surprisingly appealing numbers all night, a video shot by Megan Thee Stallion (well, if you’re going to deliberately misspell “The,” “Thee” is considerably nicer than “Tha”!) on a desert location; Megan Thee Stallion is a heavy-set big-breasted Black woman and her video, to a song called “Hot Girl,” looked like legendary 1960’s nudie director Russ Meyer decided to remake Mad Max with an all-Black cast — but she’s a highly charismatic performer and I really liked her clip. Then someone or something named Roddy Ricch, who may or may not have been the same person I had earlier identified as “Ronnie Riggs,” performing a social-comment song called “Rock Star” and did a video in which he’s carrying a gun and defying the police; later he won Album of the Year for a release called Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial, beating out more highly regarded artists like Beyoncé and Lizzo. The next number was a real surprise: Jennifer Hudson doing a cover of Aretha Franklin’s cover of Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black” (itself inspired by Lorraine Hansberry, who coined the phrase in the first place!); apparently she’s just starred in a biopic of Aretha, Respect, though it’s one of those movies that’s making its debut on a streaming channel now that movie theatres are things of the past. The trailer for Respect didn’t seem promising — Aretha and another Black woman are discussing that she’s had four albums released and hasn’t yet had a hit, suggesting that the filmmakers are taking a print-the-legend “take” on her early years at Columbia Records (yes, she did put out a lot of dreck on Columbia before switching to Atlantic in 1967 and finally breaking through to stardom, but she made some great records there, too, especially the ones on which John Hammond, who signed her to the label in the first place, actually produced her personally: her 1961 record “Maybe I’m a Fool” sounds just like — and every bit as good as — the ones that finally “broke” her at Atlantic six years later) — but Hudson seems perfectly cast as the Queen of Soul (the second Queen of Soul, anyway — Dinah Washington was the first Queen of Soul and when is someone going to do a biopic of her?).
The next song was a rap number by Anderson Pack (whom I’d never heard of) featuring J. Rock (whom I had) called “Lockdown,” though it was actually surprisingly quiet, lyrical and subtle, not the angry rant I might have expected from the title. After that was one of the evening’s few non-political songs, from someone who calls himself Lonr. (the period, as well as the misspelling, seems to be part of the name) and who apparently has collaborated with the great modern-day R&B star H.E.R. — and his song, a plaintive love ballad called “Make the Most” about a young couple who are hoping their relationship will last, inevitably made me think, “He might as well call himself H.I.M.!” The next artist was Wayne Brady doing a tribute to the late Little Richard — a medley of “Lucille,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Fruitti” — which wasn’t bad but suffered from the fact that, as capable as he is as a singer, Brady can’t play piano. After a rap by unidentified artists that introduced a tribute to Kobe Bryant, Alicia Keys came on for one of the best songs I’ve ever heard her do, a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tribute to the Black victims of police violence called “The Perfect Way to Die.” Then came the Atlanta-born R&B duo Chloe x Halle (they’re sisters, those are their real first names, and their last name is Bailey) doing an odd medley of two songs, “Forgive Me” and “Do It.” For “Forgive Me” they were dressed in skimpy black leather outfits that made them look like street hookers; for “Do It” (actually a gentler song than “Forgive Me,” despite what you’d think from the titles) they wore almost as skimpy bits of white cloth that made them look like call girls. But I really liked the scene towards the end in which, taking advantage of the fact that they weren’t performing live, they set up a split screen so the black leather-clad Chloe x Halle and the white-cloth clad Chloe x Halle appeared simultaneously: Chlor x Halle x Chloe x Halle!
Then came a performance by DJ Diesel backing a rapper who remained both unidentified and unseen on a quite good (for the genre) song called “Pop, Lock and Drop It.” The next number was by Summer Walker (a woman, whom I hadn’t heard of before) and Usher, a duet on a song that appeared to be called “You Don’t Know What Love Is” even though it had nothing to do with the oldie of that title; Usher seemed more comfortable here than he had covering James Brown at the Kennedy Center four years ago but lacked the wrenching power he’d brought to his own song, “I Cry,” on the Global Citizen telecast last Saturday. The next song was a medley of Jonathan McReynolds’ “Deliver Us from People” and Kane Brown’s (a woman) “You’re Missing Every Color” — or was it called “Undeniably Beautiful”? After that came the finale, a gospel number featuring Karen Chark Sheard of the legendary Clark Sisters and her daughter, Kierra Sheard, doing a powerful and towering song called “Something Had to Break” and showing where all African-American music ultimately comes from: the righteous power and soul of Black spirituals and gospel. There was also a segment featuring Michelle Obama giving a humanitarian award to Beyoncé — sometimes it feels like the Obamas are leading a government in exile while the fascist Trump occupation of America continues. Overall the BET Entertainment Awards show was the usual lumbering beast most awards shows turn into, and it suffered from the virtual presentation enforced on it by the pandemic (since both the presenters and the awardees had to film their segments in advance, the producers had to let them know who’d won in advance and there were no envelopes and no suspense), but they managed to work out a viable way to do an awards show in the SARS-CoV-2 era and some of the performances were wonderful.
Monday, June 29, 2020
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Global Citizen 2020: Unite for Our Future (Global Citizen Foundation, NBC-TV, aired June 27, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The TV show I particularly wanted to watch yesterday was the 2020 edition of the Global Citizen telecast — which has been an annual event for several years now, sponsored by a foundation underwritten by several large corporations (including Microsoft, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble) and designed to encourage young people to become “global citizen” activists to, among other things, expand the rights of women, access to education and health care in Third World countries and combat racism and sexism in the developed world. The way the concert usually works is that young people working on these various causes submit reports on what they’re doing and a group of judges goes over their applications and awards the most deserving entrants tickets to an all-star mega-concert featuring the major pop-music artists of today. Obviously the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic changed that; the projects that were being honored and supported by Global Citizen were almost all focused on controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and expanding health-care opportunities for people at risk of getting it (I’m using the U.S. Centers for Disease Control nomenclature here: SARS-CoV-2 is the official scientific name for the virus and COVID-19 is the disease associated with it), and of course there wasn’t one big mega-concert in one locale with a huge audience either. Instead, not only did the performers sing without an audience, most of them performed outdoors (where there’s presumably less chance of catching the viruses from those pesky “aerosols” and “droplets” that come out of people’s mouths).
There also seemed to be a higher talk-to-music ratio than on previous Global Citizen concerts, with the result that the musical acts seemed to be more of an afterthought to a documentary on what the world — or at least some particularly dedicated, committed and courageous people in it — is doing to answer the challenge of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19. Among the speakers giving video statements or doing interviews were Bill Gates of Microsoft — who, since President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in the middle of the world’s worst pandemic in over 100 years, actually became its biggest funder, giving it more than any of the world’s governments! — and no fewer than eight heads of state: Erna Solberg of Norway, Emmanuel Macron of France, Lee Halen Loong of Singapore, Justin Trudeau of Canada, Angela Merkel of Germany, Boris Johnson of Great Britain, Giuseppe Conte of Italy and Pedro Sánchez of Spain. (Notice anyone missing?) The musical portions of the concert began with Jennifer Hudson singing a song called “Where Peaceful Waters Flow,” and while I still find it hard to reconcile the post-Weight Watchers version of Hudson with the Big Soul Mama who took the world by storm in her tour de force in the film Dreamgirls, the voice is still largely intact and the song was the first of quite a few numbers in the program to emphasize strength, determination, perseverance and the hope that someday relatively soon we can put behind us all the things we’ve been forced to do (and not do) during the pandemic.
The next song was called “Freedom” by the For Love Choir, and then Miley Cyrus appeared in an otherwise empty stadium singing, of all things, the Beatles’ song “Help!” I was taken aback by her excellent phrasing of the opening, which she sang slowly and movingly. Alas, then she sped up the tempo to that of the Beatles’ original — and the arrangement was even similar, except she added a pedal steel guitar — and she sang from a circular platform that served as the bottom dot of the exclamation point in the title. The title was spelled out on the stadium floor in giant letters, evoking both the logo of the Beatles’ film for which the song was originally written and a literal cry for help similar to the ones that appeared on the rooftops of flooded New Orleans homes during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Though Cyrus’s performance would have been even more powerful had she stuck to the slow tempo of her opening, it was still a wrenching performance of a song that’s been almost criminally underrated and misunderstood: in one of his last interviews John Lennon explained that he had meant the song as a literal cry for help, and people hadn’t believed that an internationally famous 25-year-old could need help about anything. I’m not sure if this was deliberate on the part of Global Citizen’s producers — though I suspect it was —but they followed “Help!” with a song called “Helpless” performed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the musical Hamilton (whose film version was supposed to have a major theatrical release July 4 but will be streaming on the “Disney+” channel instead. The next musical selection was an excellent song called “I Cry” by Usher, whom I’d just seen channeling James Brown on the ABC special Taking the Stage (a rerun of an all-star show originally broadcast January12, 2017 celebrating the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture) but who was far better doing a song of his own and showing a raw, naked emotionalism appropriate to the occasion and a far cry from the swaggering, boastful soul boasts James Brown specialized in.
The next artist was Shakira, who blessedly sang in Spanish (a lot of foreign divas who try to sing in English simply can’t bring the same level of passion and commitment they can when they sing in their native tongues) and did a quite good song called “Sale el Sol.” It was the title song of a 2010 album and the Wikipedia page on it says, “Its lyrics encourage one to be optimistic during difficult times” — not surprisingly since a lot of the artists on this Global Citizen telecast picked songs about being optimistic during difficult times! The next song was totally unidentified — it consisted of four different singers in what have become the all too familiar boxes of a Zoom screen coming together for a song that seemed to be called either “We Will Fall Together” or “We Will Rise Together,” yet another anthem about holding people together in difficult times and resolving the bizarre irony of having to create and build unity between people during a crisis in which the kind of physical bonding people usually do to confront crises is one of the things we are most specifically and solemnly told we must not do. (The many variations on the phrase “we’re together though we’re apart” have become among the most annoying clichés of the SARS-CoV-2 era.) After that Justin Bieber and a Black singer-rapper named Queyo teamed up for a quite good song called “Intentions” — and once again, as with Miley Cyrus, I was quite impressed by the power and sincerity of a performer I’d largely written off as a manufactured pop entertainer. Then Coldplay came on with an ironically titled song called “Paradise,” complete with a stunning animated video that evoked 1960’s psychedelica (hey, that’s when I was a teenager, so I have a special affection for anything that draws on that era).
Then the show presented a song I’d previously seen and heard performed on Stephen Colbert’s show by its creator, Christine and the Queens — one of those identities, like Bon Iver, St.Vincent and The Weeknd, that’s made to sound like a group even though it denotes just one person. Her (or should I say “their”?) real name is Héloïse Adelaïde Letissier, she identifies as “pansexual” and “genderqueer,” and she wrote “La Vita Nova.” the song she performed in the Global Citizen telecast, in 2015 as a response to the death of her mother — and, since she’s said she “does not want to choose between French music and English pop music,” its lyrics alternate between English and French. Then there was a number that was billed as a celebration of Nigerian pop culture and the so-called “high life” music that emerged there in the early 1970’s but never seemed to catch on in the West even though it’s just as infectious and danceable as the South African “township jive” that reached the rest of the world through Paul Simon’s 1986 Grammy Award-winning album Graceland. (Maybe if Paul Simon had recorded an album in Nigeria … ). The basis for the song came from an interesting source: an African ensemble of singers and dancers called the Dreamcatchers Academy whose members are recruited from schoolchildren and whose purpose is to get kids to stay in school by offering them the chance to sing and dance as an inducement. Alas, what we actually heard was Latino rapper J. Balvin and members of the Dreamcatchers Academy doing an O.K. song called “Quel Color es Mi Gente?” (the title, in case you couldn’t guess, means “What Color Are My People?”). The sentiments were impeccable but the song itself was the lamest piece on the program.
After a hot duet called “Rest of Your Life” by Chloe x Halle (an African-American R&B duo comprised of sisters Chloe and Halle Bailey, who performed in skin-tight outfits and brought a lot of energy to an O.K. but not especially memorable song) we fortunately got a taste of real Nigerian high-life music in the song “Shakere” by a singer I’d noted as “Yoma Alade” but who I think is a well-known Nigerian talent named Aramide, a tall, heavy-set woman physically reminiscent of modern-day African-American singers Fantasia and Lizzo (and before them of the 1950’s R&B queens Big Maybelle and Annie Laurie, as well as Bessie Smith and many of her contemporaries even earlier!) whose shattering, high-energy performance was one of the best things on the program. It’s true she’s “contemporized” the high-life sound by adding electric guitars, synthesizers and drum machines, but she’s so sincere and her voice is so overwhelming, who cares? The show’s finale was an unusual combination — singer J’Nai Bridges with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, or at least a handful of musicians therefrom so that, even on the broad expanse of the stage of the (empty) Hollywood Bowl, they could be properly “socially distanced” at least six feet apart from each other, singing a medley of a song called “Heaven” (not the “Heav’n, Heav’n” Marian Anderson recorded so beautifully for Musicraft’s classical label, Masterpiece, in the 1940’s but what sounded like modern-day gospel-pop) and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand,” which is an authentic spiritual. Bridges alternated pronouns between “He’s got the whole world in his hands” and “She’s got the whole world in her hands,” which I liked even though my all-time favorite version of the song is Mahalia Jackson’s from the 1950’s (mainly because not only did she do the song as rockin’ gospel but she added a release: “If religion were a thing that money could buy/Then the rich would live and the poor would die:”).
I’ve read in The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times that some European orchestras and opera houses have gingerly dipped their toes back into live performances, masking off some of the seats so the audience can be properly “socially distant” (I hate the phrase “social distancing” and hope it will fade out of use once the current emergency is over, but I fear it won’t) and doing what Dudamel was doing at the Bowl: using only a handful of musicians so he can space them out across the stage. It’s a compliment to their professionalism that, despite their being so fewer of them, the musicians still stayed together and didn’t seem fazed by those yawning expanses of space between them. After the show MS-NBC went to their usual news coverage, announcing that the European Union is banning travelers from the United States (take that, Mr. Wall-Builder Trump!) and that day four U.S. states — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Nevada — reported their all-time highest one-day totals of COVID-19 cases. As much as I miss public life, it does seem like the U.S. reopened way too soon, and as much as we (especially President “Kung Flu” Trump) wants to blame it on outsiders in general and the Chinese in particular, the United States has become the world’s epicenter of the pandemic. There are a lot of people in this country doing their best to fight the pandemic and keep people alive and healthy, but they’re not getting support from this ass-backwards government we’ve stuck ourselves with thanks to, among other things, our creaky way of running a republic!
The TV show I particularly wanted to watch yesterday was the 2020 edition of the Global Citizen telecast — which has been an annual event for several years now, sponsored by a foundation underwritten by several large corporations (including Microsoft, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble) and designed to encourage young people to become “global citizen” activists to, among other things, expand the rights of women, access to education and health care in Third World countries and combat racism and sexism in the developed world. The way the concert usually works is that young people working on these various causes submit reports on what they’re doing and a group of judges goes over their applications and awards the most deserving entrants tickets to an all-star mega-concert featuring the major pop-music artists of today. Obviously the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic changed that; the projects that were being honored and supported by Global Citizen were almost all focused on controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and expanding health-care opportunities for people at risk of getting it (I’m using the U.S. Centers for Disease Control nomenclature here: SARS-CoV-2 is the official scientific name for the virus and COVID-19 is the disease associated with it), and of course there wasn’t one big mega-concert in one locale with a huge audience either. Instead, not only did the performers sing without an audience, most of them performed outdoors (where there’s presumably less chance of catching the viruses from those pesky “aerosols” and “droplets” that come out of people’s mouths).
There also seemed to be a higher talk-to-music ratio than on previous Global Citizen concerts, with the result that the musical acts seemed to be more of an afterthought to a documentary on what the world — or at least some particularly dedicated, committed and courageous people in it — is doing to answer the challenge of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19. Among the speakers giving video statements or doing interviews were Bill Gates of Microsoft — who, since President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in the middle of the world’s worst pandemic in over 100 years, actually became its biggest funder, giving it more than any of the world’s governments! — and no fewer than eight heads of state: Erna Solberg of Norway, Emmanuel Macron of France, Lee Halen Loong of Singapore, Justin Trudeau of Canada, Angela Merkel of Germany, Boris Johnson of Great Britain, Giuseppe Conte of Italy and Pedro Sánchez of Spain. (Notice anyone missing?) The musical portions of the concert began with Jennifer Hudson singing a song called “Where Peaceful Waters Flow,” and while I still find it hard to reconcile the post-Weight Watchers version of Hudson with the Big Soul Mama who took the world by storm in her tour de force in the film Dreamgirls, the voice is still largely intact and the song was the first of quite a few numbers in the program to emphasize strength, determination, perseverance and the hope that someday relatively soon we can put behind us all the things we’ve been forced to do (and not do) during the pandemic.
The next song was called “Freedom” by the For Love Choir, and then Miley Cyrus appeared in an otherwise empty stadium singing, of all things, the Beatles’ song “Help!” I was taken aback by her excellent phrasing of the opening, which she sang slowly and movingly. Alas, then she sped up the tempo to that of the Beatles’ original — and the arrangement was even similar, except she added a pedal steel guitar — and she sang from a circular platform that served as the bottom dot of the exclamation point in the title. The title was spelled out on the stadium floor in giant letters, evoking both the logo of the Beatles’ film for which the song was originally written and a literal cry for help similar to the ones that appeared on the rooftops of flooded New Orleans homes during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Though Cyrus’s performance would have been even more powerful had she stuck to the slow tempo of her opening, it was still a wrenching performance of a song that’s been almost criminally underrated and misunderstood: in one of his last interviews John Lennon explained that he had meant the song as a literal cry for help, and people hadn’t believed that an internationally famous 25-year-old could need help about anything. I’m not sure if this was deliberate on the part of Global Citizen’s producers — though I suspect it was —but they followed “Help!” with a song called “Helpless” performed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the musical Hamilton (whose film version was supposed to have a major theatrical release July 4 but will be streaming on the “Disney+” channel instead. The next musical selection was an excellent song called “I Cry” by Usher, whom I’d just seen channeling James Brown on the ABC special Taking the Stage (a rerun of an all-star show originally broadcast January12, 2017 celebrating the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture) but who was far better doing a song of his own and showing a raw, naked emotionalism appropriate to the occasion and a far cry from the swaggering, boastful soul boasts James Brown specialized in.
The next artist was Shakira, who blessedly sang in Spanish (a lot of foreign divas who try to sing in English simply can’t bring the same level of passion and commitment they can when they sing in their native tongues) and did a quite good song called “Sale el Sol.” It was the title song of a 2010 album and the Wikipedia page on it says, “Its lyrics encourage one to be optimistic during difficult times” — not surprisingly since a lot of the artists on this Global Citizen telecast picked songs about being optimistic during difficult times! The next song was totally unidentified — it consisted of four different singers in what have become the all too familiar boxes of a Zoom screen coming together for a song that seemed to be called either “We Will Fall Together” or “We Will Rise Together,” yet another anthem about holding people together in difficult times and resolving the bizarre irony of having to create and build unity between people during a crisis in which the kind of physical bonding people usually do to confront crises is one of the things we are most specifically and solemnly told we must not do. (The many variations on the phrase “we’re together though we’re apart” have become among the most annoying clichés of the SARS-CoV-2 era.) After that Justin Bieber and a Black singer-rapper named Queyo teamed up for a quite good song called “Intentions” — and once again, as with Miley Cyrus, I was quite impressed by the power and sincerity of a performer I’d largely written off as a manufactured pop entertainer. Then Coldplay came on with an ironically titled song called “Paradise,” complete with a stunning animated video that evoked 1960’s psychedelica (hey, that’s when I was a teenager, so I have a special affection for anything that draws on that era).
Then the show presented a song I’d previously seen and heard performed on Stephen Colbert’s show by its creator, Christine and the Queens — one of those identities, like Bon Iver, St.Vincent and The Weeknd, that’s made to sound like a group even though it denotes just one person. Her (or should I say “their”?) real name is Héloïse Adelaïde Letissier, she identifies as “pansexual” and “genderqueer,” and she wrote “La Vita Nova.” the song she performed in the Global Citizen telecast, in 2015 as a response to the death of her mother — and, since she’s said she “does not want to choose between French music and English pop music,” its lyrics alternate between English and French. Then there was a number that was billed as a celebration of Nigerian pop culture and the so-called “high life” music that emerged there in the early 1970’s but never seemed to catch on in the West even though it’s just as infectious and danceable as the South African “township jive” that reached the rest of the world through Paul Simon’s 1986 Grammy Award-winning album Graceland. (Maybe if Paul Simon had recorded an album in Nigeria … ). The basis for the song came from an interesting source: an African ensemble of singers and dancers called the Dreamcatchers Academy whose members are recruited from schoolchildren and whose purpose is to get kids to stay in school by offering them the chance to sing and dance as an inducement. Alas, what we actually heard was Latino rapper J. Balvin and members of the Dreamcatchers Academy doing an O.K. song called “Quel Color es Mi Gente?” (the title, in case you couldn’t guess, means “What Color Are My People?”). The sentiments were impeccable but the song itself was the lamest piece on the program.
After a hot duet called “Rest of Your Life” by Chloe x Halle (an African-American R&B duo comprised of sisters Chloe and Halle Bailey, who performed in skin-tight outfits and brought a lot of energy to an O.K. but not especially memorable song) we fortunately got a taste of real Nigerian high-life music in the song “Shakere” by a singer I’d noted as “Yoma Alade” but who I think is a well-known Nigerian talent named Aramide, a tall, heavy-set woman physically reminiscent of modern-day African-American singers Fantasia and Lizzo (and before them of the 1950’s R&B queens Big Maybelle and Annie Laurie, as well as Bessie Smith and many of her contemporaries even earlier!) whose shattering, high-energy performance was one of the best things on the program. It’s true she’s “contemporized” the high-life sound by adding electric guitars, synthesizers and drum machines, but she’s so sincere and her voice is so overwhelming, who cares? The show’s finale was an unusual combination — singer J’Nai Bridges with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, or at least a handful of musicians therefrom so that, even on the broad expanse of the stage of the (empty) Hollywood Bowl, they could be properly “socially distanced” at least six feet apart from each other, singing a medley of a song called “Heaven” (not the “Heav’n, Heav’n” Marian Anderson recorded so beautifully for Musicraft’s classical label, Masterpiece, in the 1940’s but what sounded like modern-day gospel-pop) and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand,” which is an authentic spiritual. Bridges alternated pronouns between “He’s got the whole world in his hands” and “She’s got the whole world in her hands,” which I liked even though my all-time favorite version of the song is Mahalia Jackson’s from the 1950’s (mainly because not only did she do the song as rockin’ gospel but she added a release: “If religion were a thing that money could buy/Then the rich would live and the poor would die:”).
I’ve read in The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times that some European orchestras and opera houses have gingerly dipped their toes back into live performances, masking off some of the seats so the audience can be properly “socially distant” (I hate the phrase “social distancing” and hope it will fade out of use once the current emergency is over, but I fear it won’t) and doing what Dudamel was doing at the Bowl: using only a handful of musicians so he can space them out across the stage. It’s a compliment to their professionalism that, despite their being so fewer of them, the musicians still stayed together and didn’t seem fazed by those yawning expanses of space between them. After the show MS-NBC went to their usual news coverage, announcing that the European Union is banning travelers from the United States (take that, Mr. Wall-Builder Trump!) and that day four U.S. states — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Nevada — reported their all-time highest one-day totals of COVID-19 cases. As much as I miss public life, it does seem like the U.S. reopened way too soon, and as much as we (especially President “Kung Flu” Trump) wants to blame it on outsiders in general and the Chinese in particular, the United States has become the world’s epicenter of the pandemic. There are a lot of people in this country doing their best to fight the pandemic and keep people alive and healthy, but they’re not getting support from this ass-backwards government we’ve stuck ourselves with thanks to, among other things, our creaky way of running a republic!
The Wrong Housesitter (Hybrid LLC/Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Later in the evening I watched a couple of Lifetime movies that were part of a series the network was calling “Wrongfully Yours, with Vivica A. Fox.” I’d always assumed her first name was pronounced “Vye-VEE-kuh,” but no-o-o-o-o, according to the lady herself (who was featured in the promo spots for the series) it’s “VI-Vi-Kuh.” All of these movies have “The Wrong _________ ” in their titles and they’re all made in Canada by the Hybrid LLC production company. They all — or at least the two I watched last night — feature Fox as one of the producers as well as an on-screen actor in a significant supporting role, and they’re all directed by David DeCoteau from “original” stories (quotes definitely merited!) by Aubrey Schenck and Peter Sulllivan, though the people who turned the stories into full, filmable scripts were different: Adam Rockoff on The Wrong Housesitter (2020) and Matthew Jason Walsh on The Wrong Student (2017). Incidentally, imdb.com insists on spelling the title of the 2020 film as The Wrong House Sitter — two words — but The Wrong Housesitter is what actually appears on the opening credits. The Wrong Housesitter begins with the police coming to the home of a tall, striking-looking corn-rowed African-American man wearing a white shirt with his nipples showing under the fabric (apparently Hybrid LLC’s casting director loves nipples on men as much as I do!) and warning him that so far he’s handled the situation acceptably but they can’t allow him to do anything foolish now. He’s seeking an eviction order against a houseguest who decidedly overstayed her welcome — we don’t see her, at least not yet, but we’re told in the dialogue it’s a woman — and when the police and the homeowner go in she’s left but she’s written a big graffito message reading, “I’ll Be Back.”
We don’t see this character again, darnit, though the male lead we do see is just about as gorgeous: he’s Dan Sittell (Jason-Shane Scott), magazine writer who made a large sum of money for selling one of his stories to a movie studio and used it to buy his literal dream home to share with his girlfriend Mary (Ciarra Carter). As far as we have to go to achieve true racial equality in the United States, it’s still a measure of how far we’ve come that Dan is white, Mary is Black and that’s not an issue in the plot at all. Dan is about to leave town on an assignment to write about some New York developer’s cockamamie scheme to turn the city’s elaborate network of underground tunnels into a new community with homes, retail and offices (Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress — in which people realize they can’t live on the moon, so they set up their colony in it — in real life!) and she wants Mary to house-sit for him, but Mary, who works as a consultant for corporations facing major image problems, also has to go out of town. So he decides to hire a professional housesitter, and as (bad) luck would have it, the first one he meets is Kristen Turner (Anna Marie Dobbins), whom he runs into at the City Lights Bookstore — the same set the Hybrid people previously used in the 2018 movie The Wrong Teacher (about which I commented that they appropriated the name from the legendary real-life San Francisco bookstore and publishing house, only the geography of the unnamed city they located it in is flat, unlike the famously hilly San Francisco) — and decides to hire on the spot when he finds she’s done that sort of work before. Alas, just before he leaves for his assignment in New York Kristen has him sign what she tells him is an employment contract but — though neither he nor we find this out until halfway through the movie — is really a tenancy contract that makes her a sub-lessee and means he can’t throw her out for a year. Of course Kristen’s real agenda is to drive Mary out of the picture and claim Dan for herself, and when she can’t seduce Dan into having sex with her willingly she drugs his drink while he’s on his couch and then arranges his body so it looks like they’re making love and shoots a few selfies of the two of them (supposedly) together.
In case you’re wondering where Vivica A. Fox fits into all this, she plays Dan’s editor, Debbie DeCroix, who lets Dan use her office to write his piece once Kristen makes his home life so uncomfortable he can’t work there. She insists that she has every right to be there — which she does, legally — and she also completely redecorates his home with stuff she’s got from thrift stores. Mary — ya remember Mary? — gets delayed when her assignment stretches out longer than she (or we) expected, which gives Kristen the chance to tell long-haired nosy neighbor Tracy Bell (unlisted on imdb.com) that she is Dan’s boyfriend. Kristen also tells Dan’s editor Debbie that she’s Dan’s girlfriend — are we really supposed to believe she’s never met the real one? — which leads Debbie to tell Kristen, “You’re not at all what I expected.” Of course Kristen has also hired a hunky security guide named Lance (Jon Sprik) to wire the bedrooms with security cameras so she can eavesdrop on Dan every time he’s home — including when he wants to make love with Mary, who draws back not because she knows they’re being watched electronically but just because she’s nervous about “doing it” when there’s a third person in the house — and she also grabbed the chance to download the entire contents of Dan’s phone to the hard drive of her laptop, so when Dan asks Debbie’s attorney, Brenda Evans (also not listed on imdb.com, though she’s a heavy-set and rather dykey-looking white woman and she and Debbie put their arms around each other when they greet, making me wonder if we were being set up for a plot twist that they were a Lesbian couple) if there’s any way he can get Kristen out of his house and she finally comes up with something, Kristen intercepts the call and feeds Brenda a glass of poisoned water, killing her.
Then Kristen strangles that nosy neighbor Tracy and leaves her body in Dan’s bed, though oddly the cops do not suspect Dan of the murder (I thought Kristen was going to frame him as revenge for his not being interested in her). Mary, who broke up with Dan when Kristen showed her the selfies she took of herself and Dan looking like they’d just made love — which they hadn’t — reconciles with him and the film ends with them finally rid of the Roommate from Hell … though Kristen escapes, and the last shot is of the exterior of the City Lights Bookstore, which led me to dread that we were going to get one of those abominably open-ended endings Lifetime has been partial to lately in which the last shot we see is the Bad Girl picking up her next pigeon … though, fortunately, Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Rockoff didn’t go there. The Wrong Housesitter is a pretty much by-the-numbers Lifetime movie, blessed with a genuinely hot, hunky male lead (I especially liked the extreme close-up shot of one of Jason-Shane Scott’s nipples as he’s shown working out in his home gym) who for once isn’t cast as a villain (though that’s actually fairly common in Hybrid’s version of the Lifetime formula; in their films we don’t immediately think, “What no-good is he up to?” when we see a sexy guy as we do in movies from other Lifetime producers) but all too predictable from the get-go and lacking some of the fresh “spins” on the basic Lifetime formulae we’ve seen from other Lifetime producers and filmmakers.
Later in the evening I watched a couple of Lifetime movies that were part of a series the network was calling “Wrongfully Yours, with Vivica A. Fox.” I’d always assumed her first name was pronounced “Vye-VEE-kuh,” but no-o-o-o-o, according to the lady herself (who was featured in the promo spots for the series) it’s “VI-Vi-Kuh.” All of these movies have “The Wrong _________ ” in their titles and they’re all made in Canada by the Hybrid LLC production company. They all — or at least the two I watched last night — feature Fox as one of the producers as well as an on-screen actor in a significant supporting role, and they’re all directed by David DeCoteau from “original” stories (quotes definitely merited!) by Aubrey Schenck and Peter Sulllivan, though the people who turned the stories into full, filmable scripts were different: Adam Rockoff on The Wrong Housesitter (2020) and Matthew Jason Walsh on The Wrong Student (2017). Incidentally, imdb.com insists on spelling the title of the 2020 film as The Wrong House Sitter — two words — but The Wrong Housesitter is what actually appears on the opening credits. The Wrong Housesitter begins with the police coming to the home of a tall, striking-looking corn-rowed African-American man wearing a white shirt with his nipples showing under the fabric (apparently Hybrid LLC’s casting director loves nipples on men as much as I do!) and warning him that so far he’s handled the situation acceptably but they can’t allow him to do anything foolish now. He’s seeking an eviction order against a houseguest who decidedly overstayed her welcome — we don’t see her, at least not yet, but we’re told in the dialogue it’s a woman — and when the police and the homeowner go in she’s left but she’s written a big graffito message reading, “I’ll Be Back.”
We don’t see this character again, darnit, though the male lead we do see is just about as gorgeous: he’s Dan Sittell (Jason-Shane Scott), magazine writer who made a large sum of money for selling one of his stories to a movie studio and used it to buy his literal dream home to share with his girlfriend Mary (Ciarra Carter). As far as we have to go to achieve true racial equality in the United States, it’s still a measure of how far we’ve come that Dan is white, Mary is Black and that’s not an issue in the plot at all. Dan is about to leave town on an assignment to write about some New York developer’s cockamamie scheme to turn the city’s elaborate network of underground tunnels into a new community with homes, retail and offices (Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress — in which people realize they can’t live on the moon, so they set up their colony in it — in real life!) and she wants Mary to house-sit for him, but Mary, who works as a consultant for corporations facing major image problems, also has to go out of town. So he decides to hire a professional housesitter, and as (bad) luck would have it, the first one he meets is Kristen Turner (Anna Marie Dobbins), whom he runs into at the City Lights Bookstore — the same set the Hybrid people previously used in the 2018 movie The Wrong Teacher (about which I commented that they appropriated the name from the legendary real-life San Francisco bookstore and publishing house, only the geography of the unnamed city they located it in is flat, unlike the famously hilly San Francisco) — and decides to hire on the spot when he finds she’s done that sort of work before. Alas, just before he leaves for his assignment in New York Kristen has him sign what she tells him is an employment contract but — though neither he nor we find this out until halfway through the movie — is really a tenancy contract that makes her a sub-lessee and means he can’t throw her out for a year. Of course Kristen’s real agenda is to drive Mary out of the picture and claim Dan for herself, and when she can’t seduce Dan into having sex with her willingly she drugs his drink while he’s on his couch and then arranges his body so it looks like they’re making love and shoots a few selfies of the two of them (supposedly) together.
In case you’re wondering where Vivica A. Fox fits into all this, she plays Dan’s editor, Debbie DeCroix, who lets Dan use her office to write his piece once Kristen makes his home life so uncomfortable he can’t work there. She insists that she has every right to be there — which she does, legally — and she also completely redecorates his home with stuff she’s got from thrift stores. Mary — ya remember Mary? — gets delayed when her assignment stretches out longer than she (or we) expected, which gives Kristen the chance to tell long-haired nosy neighbor Tracy Bell (unlisted on imdb.com) that she is Dan’s boyfriend. Kristen also tells Dan’s editor Debbie that she’s Dan’s girlfriend — are we really supposed to believe she’s never met the real one? — which leads Debbie to tell Kristen, “You’re not at all what I expected.” Of course Kristen has also hired a hunky security guide named Lance (Jon Sprik) to wire the bedrooms with security cameras so she can eavesdrop on Dan every time he’s home — including when he wants to make love with Mary, who draws back not because she knows they’re being watched electronically but just because she’s nervous about “doing it” when there’s a third person in the house — and she also grabbed the chance to download the entire contents of Dan’s phone to the hard drive of her laptop, so when Dan asks Debbie’s attorney, Brenda Evans (also not listed on imdb.com, though she’s a heavy-set and rather dykey-looking white woman and she and Debbie put their arms around each other when they greet, making me wonder if we were being set up for a plot twist that they were a Lesbian couple) if there’s any way he can get Kristen out of his house and she finally comes up with something, Kristen intercepts the call and feeds Brenda a glass of poisoned water, killing her.
Then Kristen strangles that nosy neighbor Tracy and leaves her body in Dan’s bed, though oddly the cops do not suspect Dan of the murder (I thought Kristen was going to frame him as revenge for his not being interested in her). Mary, who broke up with Dan when Kristen showed her the selfies she took of herself and Dan looking like they’d just made love — which they hadn’t — reconciles with him and the film ends with them finally rid of the Roommate from Hell … though Kristen escapes, and the last shot is of the exterior of the City Lights Bookstore, which led me to dread that we were going to get one of those abominably open-ended endings Lifetime has been partial to lately in which the last shot we see is the Bad Girl picking up her next pigeon … though, fortunately, Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Rockoff didn’t go there. The Wrong Housesitter is a pretty much by-the-numbers Lifetime movie, blessed with a genuinely hot, hunky male lead (I especially liked the extreme close-up shot of one of Jason-Shane Scott’s nipples as he’s shown working out in his home gym) who for once isn’t cast as a villain (though that’s actually fairly common in Hybrid’s version of the Lifetime formula; in their films we don’t immediately think, “What no-good is he up to?” when we see a sexy guy as we do in movies from other Lifetime producers) but all too predictable from the get-go and lacking some of the fresh “spins” on the basic Lifetime formulae we’ve seen from other Lifetime producers and filmmakers.
The Wrong Student (Hybrid LLC/Lifetime, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 byMark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The next movie on Lifetime’s “Wrongfully Yours” weekend, The Wrong Student, was considerably better. David DeCoteau’s direction, pretty standard on The Wrong Housesitter, was genuinely suspenseful and almost Gothic at times even though this is a modern-dress story about high school, and writers Schenck, Sullivan and Walsh created some fairly interesting character conflicts and background that set this one above the usual Lifetime sludge. The most interesting thing they did is to kill off the parents of both the high-school girls who are the female leads, Amber Halligan (Kennedy Tucker) and Madeleine Sawyer (Evanne Friedmann). Amber’s parents both died in a car crash, whereupon her one surviving relative, Kelly Halligan (Jessica Morris, who for my money is a good deal hotter and sexier than the bland nymphet playing her niece!), Amber’s aunt on her father’s side, but Amber is bitter not only about losing her parents but her aunt moving her clear across country from New York to California because Kelly is partners with Gibson (Vivica A. Fox) in some sort of Internet business aimed at creatives and she’s decided to overcome her shock at the loss of her brother and sister-in-law by relocating to California so she and Gibson can be business partners in person instead of trying to run the company from two separate coasts.
As for Madeleine, her parents both burned to death in a house fire two years earlier, and she successfully sought legal emancipation, so she lives alone and has just turned 18. The high school Amber and Madeleine are attending has just hired a new soccer coach, a professional soccer player named Dominic Antal (Jason-Shane Scott again, with director DeCoteau once more giving us some choice shots of his pecs and the gloriously thick nipples that adorn them), though the school’s athletic director, hatchet-faced Coach Hendricks (Helene Udy), doesn’t like him and insists that she’s going to get the school board to fire him once his one-year contract is up. She also let slip that she’s deathly allergic to peanuts, so Madeleine eliminates her by spiking her brown-bag lunch sandwich with peanut oil and boosting her EpiPen (shown on screen as “EpPen” because the pharmaceutical extortionists who have jacked up the price of this device tenfold also apparently wouldn’t allow their trademark to be used in this film) from her purse so she can’t get at it. Like Kristen in The Wrong Housesitter, Madeleine “spoofs” Amber’s phone so she can lure fellow student Riley Jones (Ryan Moore, who looks like he’s at least in his 20’s even though he’s playing a high-school boy) to a deserted park and kill him, then frame Amber for the crime. The case is caught by police detectives Andrade (William McNamara) and Mauro (Galyn Görg), a middle-aged woman whose face looks like it’s seen better days, and Andrade is sure Amber killed Riley over a drug deal gone bad while Mauro isn’t so sure. Meanwhile Amber’s Aunt Kelly has become attracted to the hunky soccer coach and has started to date him — much to the fury of Madeleine, who’s decided she will get the hot coach no matter how many people she has to kill and how much damage she has to do to have him.
Madeleine killed Riley with a fish-gutting knife we see so much of it almost becomes a character in itself — she’d seen Riley break into her house and spot the traditional wall of photos she’s posted to show her obsession with Dominic, a very old movie device and one that ought to have long since been retired — and later she threatens Amber with the same knife. She also throws a rock through the front window of Kelly’s and Amber’s home, and she’s written on the rock with marking pen, “LEAVE DOMINIC ALONE.” When Kelly doesn’t leave Dominic alone — indeed, when she invites him in after he’s just come back from a party where Madeleine asked him to drive her home because she was drunk, only her real agenda was to make a pass at him, Madeleine decides to extract her revenge by breaking into the office of Kelly’s and Gibson’s business and destroying their computer server, thus putting their Web site out of business for weeks. This is an example of Lifetime’s writers giving their villainesses almost supernatural powers: 1) How did Madeleine even know where Kelly’s and Gibson’s office was? 2) How did she know where the servers were? 3) Aren’t Internet servers usually at remote locations in the so-called “cloud” anyway? And 4), since we haven’t seen any evidence that Madeleine is taking computer science, how would she know how to destroy a Web-based business that thoroughly? Nonetheless, Madeleine proceeds with the rest of her revenge plan: she overpowers Amber and tells Kelly, when she shows up and tries to rescue her niece, that she intends to burn down the house and make it look like an accident killed both of them. (Hardened Lifetime watchers were probably already suspecting that Madeleine became an orphan in the first place by burning down her home and killing her parents inside it, though Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Walsh never specify that one way or the other.)
It ends with Gibson, who like most of Vivica A. Fox’s characters is the intelligent, sensible Black woman who tries to talk the white characters out of all the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all (though she gets to play a professional instead of a maid, I’d argue that Fox is really the modern-day heir to Hattie McDaniel and her “Mammy” roles in that regard), finally doing something sensible —like calling the police, who ultimately overpower and arrest Madeleine so the rest of the high-school soccer team can continue and Kelly and Coach Dominic can finally get it on. As formulaic and sometimes silly as The Wrong Student sometimes get, the fact that both Amber and Madeleine have lost both their parents gives it a haunted, almost doomed air — though the writers could have made that even stronger if they’d had the two girls bond over their shared tragedies until Amber slowly discovers Madeleine’s true nature — and one thing I particularly liked about this film in general and DeCoteau’s direction in particular is he did not make Evanne Friedmann play Madeleine with the relentless perkiness Lifetime usually imposes on its high-school girl psychos. Instead Friedmann gives Madeleine a dark, haunted quality that makes her more dangerous but also makes us feel almost sorry for her; it’s an amazing performance that deserved a more complex, multidimensional script, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Evanne Friedmann manages to rise to feature-film roles the way Hilary Swank broke out of the Lifetime ghetto (in 1996 she starred in the Lifetime movie Terror in the Family, playing a violent teenage girl who literally has her parents terrorized) into feature roles and an Academy Award.
The next movie on Lifetime’s “Wrongfully Yours” weekend, The Wrong Student, was considerably better. David DeCoteau’s direction, pretty standard on The Wrong Housesitter, was genuinely suspenseful and almost Gothic at times even though this is a modern-dress story about high school, and writers Schenck, Sullivan and Walsh created some fairly interesting character conflicts and background that set this one above the usual Lifetime sludge. The most interesting thing they did is to kill off the parents of both the high-school girls who are the female leads, Amber Halligan (Kennedy Tucker) and Madeleine Sawyer (Evanne Friedmann). Amber’s parents both died in a car crash, whereupon her one surviving relative, Kelly Halligan (Jessica Morris, who for my money is a good deal hotter and sexier than the bland nymphet playing her niece!), Amber’s aunt on her father’s side, but Amber is bitter not only about losing her parents but her aunt moving her clear across country from New York to California because Kelly is partners with Gibson (Vivica A. Fox) in some sort of Internet business aimed at creatives and she’s decided to overcome her shock at the loss of her brother and sister-in-law by relocating to California so she and Gibson can be business partners in person instead of trying to run the company from two separate coasts.
As for Madeleine, her parents both burned to death in a house fire two years earlier, and she successfully sought legal emancipation, so she lives alone and has just turned 18. The high school Amber and Madeleine are attending has just hired a new soccer coach, a professional soccer player named Dominic Antal (Jason-Shane Scott again, with director DeCoteau once more giving us some choice shots of his pecs and the gloriously thick nipples that adorn them), though the school’s athletic director, hatchet-faced Coach Hendricks (Helene Udy), doesn’t like him and insists that she’s going to get the school board to fire him once his one-year contract is up. She also let slip that she’s deathly allergic to peanuts, so Madeleine eliminates her by spiking her brown-bag lunch sandwich with peanut oil and boosting her EpiPen (shown on screen as “EpPen” because the pharmaceutical extortionists who have jacked up the price of this device tenfold also apparently wouldn’t allow their trademark to be used in this film) from her purse so she can’t get at it. Like Kristen in The Wrong Housesitter, Madeleine “spoofs” Amber’s phone so she can lure fellow student Riley Jones (Ryan Moore, who looks like he’s at least in his 20’s even though he’s playing a high-school boy) to a deserted park and kill him, then frame Amber for the crime. The case is caught by police detectives Andrade (William McNamara) and Mauro (Galyn Görg), a middle-aged woman whose face looks like it’s seen better days, and Andrade is sure Amber killed Riley over a drug deal gone bad while Mauro isn’t so sure. Meanwhile Amber’s Aunt Kelly has become attracted to the hunky soccer coach and has started to date him — much to the fury of Madeleine, who’s decided she will get the hot coach no matter how many people she has to kill and how much damage she has to do to have him.
Madeleine killed Riley with a fish-gutting knife we see so much of it almost becomes a character in itself — she’d seen Riley break into her house and spot the traditional wall of photos she’s posted to show her obsession with Dominic, a very old movie device and one that ought to have long since been retired — and later she threatens Amber with the same knife. She also throws a rock through the front window of Kelly’s and Amber’s home, and she’s written on the rock with marking pen, “LEAVE DOMINIC ALONE.” When Kelly doesn’t leave Dominic alone — indeed, when she invites him in after he’s just come back from a party where Madeleine asked him to drive her home because she was drunk, only her real agenda was to make a pass at him, Madeleine decides to extract her revenge by breaking into the office of Kelly’s and Gibson’s business and destroying their computer server, thus putting their Web site out of business for weeks. This is an example of Lifetime’s writers giving their villainesses almost supernatural powers: 1) How did Madeleine even know where Kelly’s and Gibson’s office was? 2) How did she know where the servers were? 3) Aren’t Internet servers usually at remote locations in the so-called “cloud” anyway? And 4), since we haven’t seen any evidence that Madeleine is taking computer science, how would she know how to destroy a Web-based business that thoroughly? Nonetheless, Madeleine proceeds with the rest of her revenge plan: she overpowers Amber and tells Kelly, when she shows up and tries to rescue her niece, that she intends to burn down the house and make it look like an accident killed both of them. (Hardened Lifetime watchers were probably already suspecting that Madeleine became an orphan in the first place by burning down her home and killing her parents inside it, though Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Walsh never specify that one way or the other.)
It ends with Gibson, who like most of Vivica A. Fox’s characters is the intelligent, sensible Black woman who tries to talk the white characters out of all the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all (though she gets to play a professional instead of a maid, I’d argue that Fox is really the modern-day heir to Hattie McDaniel and her “Mammy” roles in that regard), finally doing something sensible —like calling the police, who ultimately overpower and arrest Madeleine so the rest of the high-school soccer team can continue and Kelly and Coach Dominic can finally get it on. As formulaic and sometimes silly as The Wrong Student sometimes get, the fact that both Amber and Madeleine have lost both their parents gives it a haunted, almost doomed air — though the writers could have made that even stronger if they’d had the two girls bond over their shared tragedies until Amber slowly discovers Madeleine’s true nature — and one thing I particularly liked about this film in general and DeCoteau’s direction in particular is he did not make Evanne Friedmann play Madeleine with the relentless perkiness Lifetime usually imposes on its high-school girl psychos. Instead Friedmann gives Madeleine a dark, haunted quality that makes her more dangerous but also makes us feel almost sorry for her; it’s an amazing performance that deserved a more complex, multidimensional script, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Evanne Friedmann manages to rise to feature-film roles the way Hilary Swank broke out of the Lifetime ghetto (in 1996 she starred in the Lifetime movie Terror in the Family, playing a violent teenage girl who literally has her parents terrorized) into feature roles and an Academy Award.
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Taking the Stage: African-American Music and the Stories That Changed America (ABC-TV, Smithsonian Musuem of African-American Culture, originally aired January 12, 2017, re-run June 24, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Wednesday, June 24 at 8 p.m. I watched an unusual presentation on ABC-TV, a rerun of a show they’d done 3 ½ years ago on the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African-American History, hosted (or at least introduced) by Oprah Winfrey and held at the Kennedy Center in December 2016) with the rather awkward title Taking the Stage: African-American Music and the Stories That Changed America. It was originally broadcast on ABC January 12, 2017 — eight days before Donald Trump took over from Barack Obama as President — and Barack and Michelle Obama were in the Presidential box, sometimes clapping and singing along. Not only did the sight of the Obamas in full Presidential regalia make me nostalgic for the days when we had a President not only of professional competence but personal integrity as well, it was amazing to see him recite the words as rapper Chuck D. of the pioneering group Public Enemy said, “Fight the Power!” (Actually one could imagine Donald Trump having similar sentiments, but his idea of “The Power” is the “Deep State” of Right-wing imagining, that collection of civil servants who faithfully serve Presidents of both major parties and therefore mark them as worthy purge targets under Trump’s Gleichschaltung.) The show opened with a brief snippet of a tribute to James Brown and then went into a salute to Harlem in the 1920’s and 1930’s, with Jon Batiste (Stephen Colbert’s music director), Patti Austin and the spectacular tap dancer Savion Glover doing Cab Calloway’s “The Jumpin’ Jive” and Duke Ellington’s (actually Billy Strayhorn’s) “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The versions heard on this show were considerably louder and more raucous than the originals — a recurring problem throughout the program (Donald Vroon, editor-publisher of the American Record Guide, wrote in his current July-August 2020 issue that just about all music, including “classical” music, is getting louder because “[t]he pop composers have adapted to the fact that you have to make a big impression in the first 30 seconds”) — but still a lot of fun.
Then there was an odd tribute to Marian Anderson’s famous concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 (held outdoors because the originally slated venue, ironically called Constitution Hall, was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution and they refused to allow a Black performer to appear there; Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest — good for her! — and she and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, arranged for the outdoor concert in its place) in which they gave the assignment to sing Anderson’s opening song from the concert, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” not to one of the African-American singers who have successfully made their careers in opera and classical music after Anderson broke the color line, but to … Mary J. Blige. Actually Blige’s rendition, though it had nothing to do with Anderson’s sort of music, was a beautiful bit of soul singing — but one wishes the show had done more for the long history of Black singers in classical music. (One name I discovered almost by accident via an online reproduction of a Paramount Records ad was Florence Cole Talbert, Marian Anderson’s voice teacher and a huge talent in her own right: she recorded the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé and brought more power, mystery and drama to that hackneyed aria than anyone I can think of besides Maria Callas — no doubt just one of many great voices kept by racism from having the sort of career she deserved. Hear it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56kd69bBmlw and see if you don’t agree with me.)
The next number was Gary Clark, Jr. and the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre paying a tribute to the blues, with Clark doing a couple of choruses of Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone” (though not, alas, the final chorus that gave the Rolling Stones their name) and the Ailey troupe doing a short excerpt of their famous ballet Revelations that included “Wade in the Water” and “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel!” with two women in white dresses and a blessedly topless male cavorting on stage in a dance that didn’t have much to do with the blues but was still a lot of fun (and the man was tall, slender and incredibly agile — he reminded me of Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker in the 1935 Duke Ellington short film Symphony in Black). The next number was an odd combination of singer-guitarist Dave Grohl (who I think was the only white performer on the bill) and someone or something called “Troublefunk” doing a cover of Jimi Hendrix’ “Crosstown Traffic” which was so far off base from the original I didn’t recognize it at first. The next number was a cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood” by the modern singer Fantasia, whose voice lies higher than Aretha’s did but she understood the style and embraced it effectively. Then Usher did a four-song tribute to James Brown — “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (with that killer guitar lick that impressed me no end when I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960’s; while the white psychedelic-rock bands seemed to be trying to make a virtue of sloppiness, these Black musicians were perfectly disciplined and played tightly together), “I Feel Good,” “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “Sex Machine.” I wish he’d done “Say It Loud” last, and Usher isn’t as rough and searing in his energy as the original, but it was a good tribute and, though he doesn’t move the way Brown did, he’s agile and flexible when he dances.
Then there was an odd tribute to the great Black jazz singers — introduced by the odd statement that the only place you could go to hear them was Black nightclubs, which flatly wasn’t true: the three singers represented, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan, all played venues in the white community (in 1939 Billie headlined at Café Society, the first New York nightclub with an integrated audience), featuring Christina Aguilera, Cynthia Erivo and someone I didn’t recognize whose name, as best I could make it out from a hurriedly barked-out announcement, was “Renée Elise Goldspell.” Ms. Whatever-Her-Name-Is kicked off the proceedings with “Misty,” a jazz instrumental by Erroll Garner to which lyrics were added later for Sarah Vaughan to sing (though Johnny Mathis had the hit — unfortunately, since he simply didn’t understand Garner’s modern-jazz world the way Sarah did), followed by Erivo doing Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” and Aguilera tearing her way through “Stormy Weather.” This was offered as a tribute to Horne, though before she sang it in a 1943 musical of that title it had been introduced over 10 years earlier by Ethel Waters at the Cotton Club — and of course I lamented the great Black singers they weren’t paying tribute to, including Waters, Ella Fitzgerald and the incomparable Dinah Washington. (As great as Aretha Franklin was, she didn’t do anything Dinah hadn’t done first — and there were things Dinah could do that Aretha never could, like sing jazz.) The show then veered into tributes to African-American athletes (notably boxers Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali) and Blacks in the U.S. military: there was a moving on-stage reunion of the six surviving Tuskegee Airmen and a story about how they had to fight their war in their own all-Black unit because the U.S. military was still segregated. During the war the NAACP launched a campaign called the “Double V,” which meant victory in World War II and victory against racism at home, and one little-known fact about the explosion of African-American civil rights activism in the 1950’s and 1960’s was that a lot of Black veterans, having returned home from a war in which they were nominally fighting for freedom and against racism, came home to the same old racist crap they’d been dealing with before. It would have been nice, however, if someone on the show had mentioned that World War II was the last U.S. war in which Black servicemembers had to fight in segregated units: in 1948 President Harry Truman issued an executive order desegregating the U.S. military, and he used a lot of political capital to make sure it stuck.
Afterwards there was a salute to Black stand-up comedians, featuring Jackie “Moms” Mabley (an amazing performer from whom Whoopi Goldberg ripped off almost all her act), Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. Once again I was annoyed by who wasn’t included — I wasn’t really expecting a mention of Bill Cosby because he’s been “unpersonned” after the successful conviction of him on date-rape charges, but what about Godfrey Cambridge (whose joke about how he could never buy a flesh-colored Band-Aid — “They don’t come in my flesh color!” — has been repeated recently by Black Lives Matter supporters) or Flip Wilson? Then the music resumed with one of the original performers who’s not only alive but whose voice was as good as ever, Gladys Knight, heard on “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” I’ve made this point many times before but it bears repeating: the great Black soul voices were not “untrained.” They were trained as children in Black church choirs by the choir directors, who drilled them in the basics of singing soul — which requires as disciplined a vocal technique as singing opera. The chief victims of the myth of the “untrained” Black soul voice have been white singers who’ve believed it and thought that all you had to do to sing soul was stand in front of a band and scream. Janis Joplin’s career would not have lasted much longer than it did even if she’d lived — it’s all too obvious from her surviving performances on records and film how she was destroying her voice — and we’ve heard what trying to sing soul without the proper training can do to white women’s voices with people like Bonnie Tyler and Stevie Nicks. After Gladys Knight’s performance — easily the musical highlight of the evening — John Legend came out with his familiar tribute to Marvin Gaye, doing “What’s Goin’ On?” acceptably but without the searing power of Gaye’s original.
Then there was another high point, Herbie Hancock representing all of Black jazz (which, of course, was an impossible task for just one person), playing his star-making 1962 hit “Watermelon Man” first on a standard piano, then on a synthesizer and finally on one of those instruments that cross-breeds a keyboard and a guitar, so keyboard players can come out from behind their instruments and hop and bop on stage just like guitar players. After that was a section I found surprisingly moving: a tribute to rap (or “hip-hop,” which is what you call it if you like it) that began with Common reciting a poem by Langston Hughes, then segued into Chuck D. from Public Enemy doing “Fight the Power” and Doug E. Fresh reciting “Give It All You Got.” A surprising number of people in the auditorium, including then-President Obama, knew the words well enough to recite along with them, and though the performers started doing drum-machine impressions towards the end, for the most part I found the performance moving because I actually got to hear the words of these pieces without the cacophonous din that usually goes on behind them and drowns many of them out. (I’ve said a lot of nasty things about rap over the years, and one of them is that if you’re going to eliminate melody and harmony from music and reduce it to just lyrics and rhythm, the very least you can do for your audience is make it possible to understand the words.)
Next came the long-overdue tribute to Black Gospel music — which is really where the roots of it are: all African-American music (which has really been most or all of the world’s popular music since ragtime, and then jazz, exploded in the early 20th century) comes from spirituals and gospel. The performers included Shirley Caesar, Mary Melle, Donnie McClurkin and the Howard University Gospel Choir, and while the music was contemporary instead of traditional gospel, it was excellent and Caesar took charge with a song called “I’m Going There.” For me the show could have ended right there, but the producers had one more formidable talent to present: Stevie Wonder, who led the finale. At first I was puzzled that Wonder — who began his performance by saying, “Tomorrow our children will make history — at least those who survive,” driving home the Black Lives Matter message with the force and precision of a stiletto — did the song “Love’s in Need of Love,” a nice piece but one which had me thinking, “Hey, Stevie, why not something more anthemic, like ‘Higher Ground’ or ‘Sir Duke’?” Then he did do “Higher Ground” and it became the big finale on which the rest of the cast joined in. Taking the Stage was for the most part a quite remarkable program — though I suspect one reason ABC-TV dredged up this 3 ½-year old show was that CBS is doing something similar, with some of the same performers, tomorrow night, Sunday, June 28 — and despite my nit-picking about the great Black artists and entertainers who weren’t mentioned it was a worthy tribute to the depth and scope of the African-American culture the Smithsonian’s new museum is honoring.
On Wednesday, June 24 at 8 p.m. I watched an unusual presentation on ABC-TV, a rerun of a show they’d done 3 ½ years ago on the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African-American History, hosted (or at least introduced) by Oprah Winfrey and held at the Kennedy Center in December 2016) with the rather awkward title Taking the Stage: African-American Music and the Stories That Changed America. It was originally broadcast on ABC January 12, 2017 — eight days before Donald Trump took over from Barack Obama as President — and Barack and Michelle Obama were in the Presidential box, sometimes clapping and singing along. Not only did the sight of the Obamas in full Presidential regalia make me nostalgic for the days when we had a President not only of professional competence but personal integrity as well, it was amazing to see him recite the words as rapper Chuck D. of the pioneering group Public Enemy said, “Fight the Power!” (Actually one could imagine Donald Trump having similar sentiments, but his idea of “The Power” is the “Deep State” of Right-wing imagining, that collection of civil servants who faithfully serve Presidents of both major parties and therefore mark them as worthy purge targets under Trump’s Gleichschaltung.) The show opened with a brief snippet of a tribute to James Brown and then went into a salute to Harlem in the 1920’s and 1930’s, with Jon Batiste (Stephen Colbert’s music director), Patti Austin and the spectacular tap dancer Savion Glover doing Cab Calloway’s “The Jumpin’ Jive” and Duke Ellington’s (actually Billy Strayhorn’s) “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The versions heard on this show were considerably louder and more raucous than the originals — a recurring problem throughout the program (Donald Vroon, editor-publisher of the American Record Guide, wrote in his current July-August 2020 issue that just about all music, including “classical” music, is getting louder because “[t]he pop composers have adapted to the fact that you have to make a big impression in the first 30 seconds”) — but still a lot of fun.
Then there was an odd tribute to Marian Anderson’s famous concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 (held outdoors because the originally slated venue, ironically called Constitution Hall, was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution and they refused to allow a Black performer to appear there; Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest — good for her! — and she and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, arranged for the outdoor concert in its place) in which they gave the assignment to sing Anderson’s opening song from the concert, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” not to one of the African-American singers who have successfully made their careers in opera and classical music after Anderson broke the color line, but to … Mary J. Blige. Actually Blige’s rendition, though it had nothing to do with Anderson’s sort of music, was a beautiful bit of soul singing — but one wishes the show had done more for the long history of Black singers in classical music. (One name I discovered almost by accident via an online reproduction of a Paramount Records ad was Florence Cole Talbert, Marian Anderson’s voice teacher and a huge talent in her own right: she recorded the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé and brought more power, mystery and drama to that hackneyed aria than anyone I can think of besides Maria Callas — no doubt just one of many great voices kept by racism from having the sort of career she deserved. Hear it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56kd69bBmlw and see if you don’t agree with me.)
The next number was Gary Clark, Jr. and the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre paying a tribute to the blues, with Clark doing a couple of choruses of Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone” (though not, alas, the final chorus that gave the Rolling Stones their name) and the Ailey troupe doing a short excerpt of their famous ballet Revelations that included “Wade in the Water” and “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel!” with two women in white dresses and a blessedly topless male cavorting on stage in a dance that didn’t have much to do with the blues but was still a lot of fun (and the man was tall, slender and incredibly agile — he reminded me of Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker in the 1935 Duke Ellington short film Symphony in Black). The next number was an odd combination of singer-guitarist Dave Grohl (who I think was the only white performer on the bill) and someone or something called “Troublefunk” doing a cover of Jimi Hendrix’ “Crosstown Traffic” which was so far off base from the original I didn’t recognize it at first. The next number was a cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood” by the modern singer Fantasia, whose voice lies higher than Aretha’s did but she understood the style and embraced it effectively. Then Usher did a four-song tribute to James Brown — “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (with that killer guitar lick that impressed me no end when I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960’s; while the white psychedelic-rock bands seemed to be trying to make a virtue of sloppiness, these Black musicians were perfectly disciplined and played tightly together), “I Feel Good,” “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “Sex Machine.” I wish he’d done “Say It Loud” last, and Usher isn’t as rough and searing in his energy as the original, but it was a good tribute and, though he doesn’t move the way Brown did, he’s agile and flexible when he dances.
Then there was an odd tribute to the great Black jazz singers — introduced by the odd statement that the only place you could go to hear them was Black nightclubs, which flatly wasn’t true: the three singers represented, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan, all played venues in the white community (in 1939 Billie headlined at Café Society, the first New York nightclub with an integrated audience), featuring Christina Aguilera, Cynthia Erivo and someone I didn’t recognize whose name, as best I could make it out from a hurriedly barked-out announcement, was “Renée Elise Goldspell.” Ms. Whatever-Her-Name-Is kicked off the proceedings with “Misty,” a jazz instrumental by Erroll Garner to which lyrics were added later for Sarah Vaughan to sing (though Johnny Mathis had the hit — unfortunately, since he simply didn’t understand Garner’s modern-jazz world the way Sarah did), followed by Erivo doing Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” and Aguilera tearing her way through “Stormy Weather.” This was offered as a tribute to Horne, though before she sang it in a 1943 musical of that title it had been introduced over 10 years earlier by Ethel Waters at the Cotton Club — and of course I lamented the great Black singers they weren’t paying tribute to, including Waters, Ella Fitzgerald and the incomparable Dinah Washington. (As great as Aretha Franklin was, she didn’t do anything Dinah hadn’t done first — and there were things Dinah could do that Aretha never could, like sing jazz.) The show then veered into tributes to African-American athletes (notably boxers Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali) and Blacks in the U.S. military: there was a moving on-stage reunion of the six surviving Tuskegee Airmen and a story about how they had to fight their war in their own all-Black unit because the U.S. military was still segregated. During the war the NAACP launched a campaign called the “Double V,” which meant victory in World War II and victory against racism at home, and one little-known fact about the explosion of African-American civil rights activism in the 1950’s and 1960’s was that a lot of Black veterans, having returned home from a war in which they were nominally fighting for freedom and against racism, came home to the same old racist crap they’d been dealing with before. It would have been nice, however, if someone on the show had mentioned that World War II was the last U.S. war in which Black servicemembers had to fight in segregated units: in 1948 President Harry Truman issued an executive order desegregating the U.S. military, and he used a lot of political capital to make sure it stuck.
Afterwards there was a salute to Black stand-up comedians, featuring Jackie “Moms” Mabley (an amazing performer from whom Whoopi Goldberg ripped off almost all her act), Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. Once again I was annoyed by who wasn’t included — I wasn’t really expecting a mention of Bill Cosby because he’s been “unpersonned” after the successful conviction of him on date-rape charges, but what about Godfrey Cambridge (whose joke about how he could never buy a flesh-colored Band-Aid — “They don’t come in my flesh color!” — has been repeated recently by Black Lives Matter supporters) or Flip Wilson? Then the music resumed with one of the original performers who’s not only alive but whose voice was as good as ever, Gladys Knight, heard on “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” I’ve made this point many times before but it bears repeating: the great Black soul voices were not “untrained.” They were trained as children in Black church choirs by the choir directors, who drilled them in the basics of singing soul — which requires as disciplined a vocal technique as singing opera. The chief victims of the myth of the “untrained” Black soul voice have been white singers who’ve believed it and thought that all you had to do to sing soul was stand in front of a band and scream. Janis Joplin’s career would not have lasted much longer than it did even if she’d lived — it’s all too obvious from her surviving performances on records and film how she was destroying her voice — and we’ve heard what trying to sing soul without the proper training can do to white women’s voices with people like Bonnie Tyler and Stevie Nicks. After Gladys Knight’s performance — easily the musical highlight of the evening — John Legend came out with his familiar tribute to Marvin Gaye, doing “What’s Goin’ On?” acceptably but without the searing power of Gaye’s original.
Then there was another high point, Herbie Hancock representing all of Black jazz (which, of course, was an impossible task for just one person), playing his star-making 1962 hit “Watermelon Man” first on a standard piano, then on a synthesizer and finally on one of those instruments that cross-breeds a keyboard and a guitar, so keyboard players can come out from behind their instruments and hop and bop on stage just like guitar players. After that was a section I found surprisingly moving: a tribute to rap (or “hip-hop,” which is what you call it if you like it) that began with Common reciting a poem by Langston Hughes, then segued into Chuck D. from Public Enemy doing “Fight the Power” and Doug E. Fresh reciting “Give It All You Got.” A surprising number of people in the auditorium, including then-President Obama, knew the words well enough to recite along with them, and though the performers started doing drum-machine impressions towards the end, for the most part I found the performance moving because I actually got to hear the words of these pieces without the cacophonous din that usually goes on behind them and drowns many of them out. (I’ve said a lot of nasty things about rap over the years, and one of them is that if you’re going to eliminate melody and harmony from music and reduce it to just lyrics and rhythm, the very least you can do for your audience is make it possible to understand the words.)
Next came the long-overdue tribute to Black Gospel music — which is really where the roots of it are: all African-American music (which has really been most or all of the world’s popular music since ragtime, and then jazz, exploded in the early 20th century) comes from spirituals and gospel. The performers included Shirley Caesar, Mary Melle, Donnie McClurkin and the Howard University Gospel Choir, and while the music was contemporary instead of traditional gospel, it was excellent and Caesar took charge with a song called “I’m Going There.” For me the show could have ended right there, but the producers had one more formidable talent to present: Stevie Wonder, who led the finale. At first I was puzzled that Wonder — who began his performance by saying, “Tomorrow our children will make history — at least those who survive,” driving home the Black Lives Matter message with the force and precision of a stiletto — did the song “Love’s in Need of Love,” a nice piece but one which had me thinking, “Hey, Stevie, why not something more anthemic, like ‘Higher Ground’ or ‘Sir Duke’?” Then he did do “Higher Ground” and it became the big finale on which the rest of the cast joined in. Taking the Stage was for the most part a quite remarkable program — though I suspect one reason ABC-TV dredged up this 3 ½-year old show was that CBS is doing something similar, with some of the same performers, tomorrow night, Sunday, June 28 — and despite my nit-picking about the great Black artists and entertainers who weren’t mentioned it was a worthy tribute to the depth and scope of the African-American culture the Smithsonian’s new museum is honoring.
Friday, June 26, 2020
Viva Las Vegas (MGM, Jack Cummings Productions, Winters Hollywood Entertainment Holdings Corporation, 1964)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the last film in a DVD boxed set of five classic musicals —though I’d already had three of them in the collection, the box was cheap enough I ordered it anyway for the two I didn’t, the 1962 film version of The Music Man (which I’d seen in a theatre when it was new — ya remember movie theatres?) and the one I watched last night, a 1964 MGM release called Viva Las Vegas starring Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret, directed by George Sidney, produced by Jack Cummings and written by, of all people, Sally Benson, whose collected memoirs of her childhood in St. Louis, 5135 Kensington, had inspired one of MGM’s greatest musicals, Meet Me in St. Louis, 20 years earlier. Though there are obvious similarities between Judy Garland and Elvis — both prestigiously talented singers who had weight problems, abused prescription drugs to control them, and ultimately died of overdoses in their 40’s — from Meet Me in St. Louis to Viva Las Vegas in 20 years does not sound like a desirable career trajectory to me! Elvis buffs consider Viva Las Vegas the last movie he made with any quality at all (aside from the concert documentaries); though it was the biggest-grossing film of his career (outdoing the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, according to Variety), after it MGM and Paramount, the studios then sharing Elvis’s contract, decided to cut the budgets of his films and assign the legendary “B”-meister Sam Katzman to produce them.
Viva Las Vegas is also one of only a handful of Elvis films for which an original soundtrack album was not issued — though the title song, which appears in the film three times (opening credits, big production number in the middle and closing credits), was a major hit for him — and apparently the first and only time he ever worked with a co-star just as good at projecting sexuality on the screen as he was. Ann-Margret was just coming off her explosive film debut in Bye, Bye, Birdie — where she turned the title song into an orgasmic moan — which was also directed by George Sidney, and though apparently the still-single Elvis cruised her as energetically off-screen as his character does on, she had little use for him. At one point during the shoot Elvis went into one of his crying jags about how useless he thought his life had been and how he should have stayed with the church and become a gospel singer instead of giving his life to something as cheap and tawdry as rock ’n’ roll. Of course what Elvis was fishing for when he said things like that was reassurance — “No, Elvis! You’re great as you are, doing what you’re doing!” — and that’s the reaction he usually got. Ann-Margret, already known as a no-B.S. kind of person, said, “Why not? Little Richard did it — you could do it, too.” Elvis also accused Ann-Margret of carrying on an affair with director George Sidney just to get herself more close-ups in the film, and the off-screen antagonism between them carried over into the movie as well even though it made it hard to believe the final pairing-up of the leads.
The plot, in case you cared, revolves around the first-ever Las Vegas Grand Prix auto race — in a number of his 1960’s films, including Spinout and Speedway, Elvis was cast as a racing driver — which turns out to be a sports-car road race that, like Italy’s fabled Mille Miglia, was a one-lap race held on ordinary roads, in this case starting and finishing on the Las Vegas Strip (seeing the Strip as it stood in 1964, with all the fabled casinos that have been torn down since to make way for even bigger and gaudier ones, is one of the real treats of this film) and snaking through the Nevada desert, past Hoover Dam (which appears at least twice in this film) before it returns to the Strip. Elvis plays “Lucky” Jackson, who’s driving a rear-engined special (this film was made at the tail end of the transition in auto racing from front-engined to rear-engined cars but Elvis seems to be the only racer driving a rear-engined car) and is waiting for a new motor from Los Angeles which will supposedly make him invincible. Only the manufacturer of the motor has just one of them in stock and he plans to sell it to the first person who comes in with the cash. Elvis’s rival, Count Elmo Mancini (Cesare Danova, who’s so bland, uncharismatic and utterly unskilled as an actor you wonder how he had a career at all), is a European champion supposedly making his U.S. debut and driving a blood-red production Ferrari GT). They both chase after Ann-Margret, who plays Rusty Martin, the swimming instructor at the hotel where all the principals are staying, only she can’t stand Elvis (at least at first) and the two sing a marvelous duet in which he sings “She loves me, but she doesn’t know it yet,” and she sings, “I loathe him, but he doesn’t know it yet.” The duet has an important plot function: at the end of it she’s cornered him at the end of the high-dive at the hotel’s pool and she forces him over, and in the process he loses the bankroll he was carrying around with him in cash (which really dates this movie!) and the money flows down the swimming-pool drain and is lost.
So Elvis and his mechanic, Shorty Farnsworth (Nicky Blair in the sort of unfunny “comic relief” role that had been dragging down films like this since the silent days), have to take jobs as waiters at the hotel — though there is a rather nice comic scene in which Elvis is the room-service waiter when Danova is trying to romance Ann-Margret and of course disrupts it. Viva Las Vegas is an O.K. movie, livened up considerably by Ann-Margret’s presence — in her solos and their numbers together she totally out-dances Elvis — but reflecting all too clearly how bored Elvis was getting with his whole film career. The man who had once told his friends he wanted to be the next Marlon Brando or James Dean just stands around and looks sullen, and musically (as Charles pointed out) he sings more soulfully in the old Italian song “Santa Lucia” than in most of the rock numbers. About the one time we really see Elvis the rocker is in a scene in which he covers Ray Charles’ R&B classic “What’d I Say,” and finally given a chance to do what he did best — putting a white face on African-American music — Elvis sings and moves with real power and authority. Then he’s back to delivering the sludge Col. Tom Parker’s house songwriters dredged up for him. I had noticed when I got the reissue of Elvis’s last non-live recordings from Graceland in February and October 1976 (Elvis didn’t want to go to a recording studio so RCA Victor sent portable equipment to Elvis’s home and they recorded first in his racquetball court, which turned out to have too much of an echo even for Elvis, and then in his den), Way Down in the Jungle Room, that the rockers like “Way Down” and “Moody Blue” had a perfunctory been-there, done-that feel but he sang with real soul and emotional force on the ballads, and that was already starting to be true here.
Had Elvis been a different sort of artist and a different sort of person — one like Frank Sinatra, who no matter who was formally “managing” him took control of his own career and wouldn’t have tolerated someone like Col. Tom Parker pushing him around — he might have turned the loss of his wife Priscilla into the occasion for a great work of art the way Sinatra did, turning his breakup with Ava Gardner into the album In the Wee Small Hours. Certainly those last Elvis recordings are full of songs about lost loves with titles like “She Thinks I Still Care,” and had Elvis been more self-aware and not had the bizarre weakness as a human being that left him vulnerable to Parker’s old carnie tricks, he might have turned the collapse of his marriage into an occasion for great art instead of sinking further into lethargy and drugs. But then I’ve often written about what I call the Elvis Perplex — how much potential talent the man had, how little of it he actually used, and how big a star he became on just that little — and about how the film A Face in the Crowd was the great missed opportunity of Elvis’s career. Before Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg made that great story about the power of an unscrupulous celebrity and the business structure behind him with Andy Griffith doing the performance of his life in the lead, they had offered the part to Elvis. Had Elvis, who admired Marlon Brando and James Dean, known that the director who had made both Brando’s and Dean’s star-making films (A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden, respectively), wanted him for a part, he would no doubt have jumped at the chance. Instead Col. Parker turned down the script without ever telling Elvis it had been offered to him, and Elvis’s film career petered out into mostly dreck, with a few bright spots along the way (Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, Flaming Star) but nothing like what it could have been had it started under a major director like Kazan who would have grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and forced him to act.
Last night Charles and I watched the last film in a DVD boxed set of five classic musicals —though I’d already had three of them in the collection, the box was cheap enough I ordered it anyway for the two I didn’t, the 1962 film version of The Music Man (which I’d seen in a theatre when it was new — ya remember movie theatres?) and the one I watched last night, a 1964 MGM release called Viva Las Vegas starring Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret, directed by George Sidney, produced by Jack Cummings and written by, of all people, Sally Benson, whose collected memoirs of her childhood in St. Louis, 5135 Kensington, had inspired one of MGM’s greatest musicals, Meet Me in St. Louis, 20 years earlier. Though there are obvious similarities between Judy Garland and Elvis — both prestigiously talented singers who had weight problems, abused prescription drugs to control them, and ultimately died of overdoses in their 40’s — from Meet Me in St. Louis to Viva Las Vegas in 20 years does not sound like a desirable career trajectory to me! Elvis buffs consider Viva Las Vegas the last movie he made with any quality at all (aside from the concert documentaries); though it was the biggest-grossing film of his career (outdoing the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, according to Variety), after it MGM and Paramount, the studios then sharing Elvis’s contract, decided to cut the budgets of his films and assign the legendary “B”-meister Sam Katzman to produce them.
Viva Las Vegas is also one of only a handful of Elvis films for which an original soundtrack album was not issued — though the title song, which appears in the film three times (opening credits, big production number in the middle and closing credits), was a major hit for him — and apparently the first and only time he ever worked with a co-star just as good at projecting sexuality on the screen as he was. Ann-Margret was just coming off her explosive film debut in Bye, Bye, Birdie — where she turned the title song into an orgasmic moan — which was also directed by George Sidney, and though apparently the still-single Elvis cruised her as energetically off-screen as his character does on, she had little use for him. At one point during the shoot Elvis went into one of his crying jags about how useless he thought his life had been and how he should have stayed with the church and become a gospel singer instead of giving his life to something as cheap and tawdry as rock ’n’ roll. Of course what Elvis was fishing for when he said things like that was reassurance — “No, Elvis! You’re great as you are, doing what you’re doing!” — and that’s the reaction he usually got. Ann-Margret, already known as a no-B.S. kind of person, said, “Why not? Little Richard did it — you could do it, too.” Elvis also accused Ann-Margret of carrying on an affair with director George Sidney just to get herself more close-ups in the film, and the off-screen antagonism between them carried over into the movie as well even though it made it hard to believe the final pairing-up of the leads.
The plot, in case you cared, revolves around the first-ever Las Vegas Grand Prix auto race — in a number of his 1960’s films, including Spinout and Speedway, Elvis was cast as a racing driver — which turns out to be a sports-car road race that, like Italy’s fabled Mille Miglia, was a one-lap race held on ordinary roads, in this case starting and finishing on the Las Vegas Strip (seeing the Strip as it stood in 1964, with all the fabled casinos that have been torn down since to make way for even bigger and gaudier ones, is one of the real treats of this film) and snaking through the Nevada desert, past Hoover Dam (which appears at least twice in this film) before it returns to the Strip. Elvis plays “Lucky” Jackson, who’s driving a rear-engined special (this film was made at the tail end of the transition in auto racing from front-engined to rear-engined cars but Elvis seems to be the only racer driving a rear-engined car) and is waiting for a new motor from Los Angeles which will supposedly make him invincible. Only the manufacturer of the motor has just one of them in stock and he plans to sell it to the first person who comes in with the cash. Elvis’s rival, Count Elmo Mancini (Cesare Danova, who’s so bland, uncharismatic and utterly unskilled as an actor you wonder how he had a career at all), is a European champion supposedly making his U.S. debut and driving a blood-red production Ferrari GT). They both chase after Ann-Margret, who plays Rusty Martin, the swimming instructor at the hotel where all the principals are staying, only she can’t stand Elvis (at least at first) and the two sing a marvelous duet in which he sings “She loves me, but she doesn’t know it yet,” and she sings, “I loathe him, but he doesn’t know it yet.” The duet has an important plot function: at the end of it she’s cornered him at the end of the high-dive at the hotel’s pool and she forces him over, and in the process he loses the bankroll he was carrying around with him in cash (which really dates this movie!) and the money flows down the swimming-pool drain and is lost.
So Elvis and his mechanic, Shorty Farnsworth (Nicky Blair in the sort of unfunny “comic relief” role that had been dragging down films like this since the silent days), have to take jobs as waiters at the hotel — though there is a rather nice comic scene in which Elvis is the room-service waiter when Danova is trying to romance Ann-Margret and of course disrupts it. Viva Las Vegas is an O.K. movie, livened up considerably by Ann-Margret’s presence — in her solos and their numbers together she totally out-dances Elvis — but reflecting all too clearly how bored Elvis was getting with his whole film career. The man who had once told his friends he wanted to be the next Marlon Brando or James Dean just stands around and looks sullen, and musically (as Charles pointed out) he sings more soulfully in the old Italian song “Santa Lucia” than in most of the rock numbers. About the one time we really see Elvis the rocker is in a scene in which he covers Ray Charles’ R&B classic “What’d I Say,” and finally given a chance to do what he did best — putting a white face on African-American music — Elvis sings and moves with real power and authority. Then he’s back to delivering the sludge Col. Tom Parker’s house songwriters dredged up for him. I had noticed when I got the reissue of Elvis’s last non-live recordings from Graceland in February and October 1976 (Elvis didn’t want to go to a recording studio so RCA Victor sent portable equipment to Elvis’s home and they recorded first in his racquetball court, which turned out to have too much of an echo even for Elvis, and then in his den), Way Down in the Jungle Room, that the rockers like “Way Down” and “Moody Blue” had a perfunctory been-there, done-that feel but he sang with real soul and emotional force on the ballads, and that was already starting to be true here.
Had Elvis been a different sort of artist and a different sort of person — one like Frank Sinatra, who no matter who was formally “managing” him took control of his own career and wouldn’t have tolerated someone like Col. Tom Parker pushing him around — he might have turned the loss of his wife Priscilla into the occasion for a great work of art the way Sinatra did, turning his breakup with Ava Gardner into the album In the Wee Small Hours. Certainly those last Elvis recordings are full of songs about lost loves with titles like “She Thinks I Still Care,” and had Elvis been more self-aware and not had the bizarre weakness as a human being that left him vulnerable to Parker’s old carnie tricks, he might have turned the collapse of his marriage into an occasion for great art instead of sinking further into lethargy and drugs. But then I’ve often written about what I call the Elvis Perplex — how much potential talent the man had, how little of it he actually used, and how big a star he became on just that little — and about how the film A Face in the Crowd was the great missed opportunity of Elvis’s career. Before Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg made that great story about the power of an unscrupulous celebrity and the business structure behind him with Andy Griffith doing the performance of his life in the lead, they had offered the part to Elvis. Had Elvis, who admired Marlon Brando and James Dean, known that the director who had made both Brando’s and Dean’s star-making films (A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden, respectively), wanted him for a part, he would no doubt have jumped at the chance. Instead Col. Parker turned down the script without ever telling Elvis it had been offered to him, and Elvis’s film career petered out into mostly dreck, with a few bright spots along the way (Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, Flaming Star) but nothing like what it could have been had it started under a major director like Kazan who would have grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and forced him to act.
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Escaping Dad (Indy Entertainment/Lifetime, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Sunday Lifetime decided to commemorate Father’s Day by offering a series of movies about vicious, corrupt or contemptible fathers under the rubric “Bad Dads,” and while most of the titles were ones I’d seen before there was one I hadn’t, and it was quite good. It was called Escaping Dad — though it was shot under the working title Amber Alert — and was essentially a mashup of the 1991 theatrical feature Sleeping with the Enemy (directed by Joseph Ruben from a script by Ronald Bass based on a novel by Nancy Price, and starring Julia Roberts as an abused wife and Patrick Bergin as the husband who abuses her) and the 1999 CBS-TV movie Black and Blue (directed by Paul Shapiro from a script by April Smith based on a novel by Anna Quindlen, and starring Mary Stuart Masterson as the abused wife and Anthony LoPaglia as the husband who abuses her). Escaping Dad was written by Adam Balsam and directed by Ross Kohn, and it borrows from Black and Blue the added complication that not only is Darren Lattimer (Jason Wiles, who’s perfectly cast as a man who can maintain appearances as a decent guy in public while his interactions with his wife, whom he bosses around unmercifully, subjects to police-style interrogations about what she’s done during the day and how she’s spent “his” money, and regularly hits her when he finds her answers unsatisfactory) a wife abuser and a sexist pig, he’s also a police officer — or in this case a former police officer who went to law school and is currently the district attorney for Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the film starts out. (It was certainly ironic to be watching a fictional film set in Tulsa when that city has been so much in the news today as the site of President Trump’s comeback rally — which drew disappointingly small crowds — and the Juneteenth counter-protests organized by Black Tulsans to commemorate the end of U.S. slavery.) Darren’s wife Erin (Sunny Mabrey) lives not only in terror of her husband’s abuse but fear of what he’ll do with her two children, teenage daughter Amy (Grace Van Dien) — who’s not Darren’s child but the product of a casual sexual encounter Erin had years before (and of course when Darren tries to boss Amy around she fires back with the classic line, “You’re not my dad!”) and eight-year-old Charlie (Andy Walken), who is Darren’s biological son and also a diabetic who’s regularly going into insulin shocks and needing emergency injections. The film opens at a party Darren is giving to build support and a donor base for his upcoming run for Congress, and Darren gets mad at Erin for not wearing the horribly ugly yellow dress he bought her for the occasion — instead she took one of the family credit cards and bought sexier dresses both for herself and Amy — and she wore red lipstick to the party after he explicitly told her not to.
He punches her out for these bizarre infractions — the contrast between the triviality of her actions and the severity of his punishments is a oft-told tale of real abusive relationships as well — and he also mutters that their marriage is “’til death do us part” (while we’re worried that his actions will bring about her death well ahead of schedule!) and that if she ever tries to leave him, “I’ll hunt you down.” He also says that since he’s the district attorney and an ex-cop besides, if she tries to report him to law enforcement they’ll believe him over her and he’ll get away with whatever he’s done to her. One day it’s all too much for her and she takes the kids — not telling them what’s going on — and flees, after first taking the $6,000 in their joint bank account and changing the password on their computer so he can’t access any information about her. There are various complications, including the fact that Charlie is at a summer camp (given the in-joke name “Camp Indy” — “Indy Entertainment” was the name of the production company that made this film) and she has to fetch him, and the queeny schlub who’s the camp counselor receives Darren’s phone call just as Erin is taking Charlie and tries in vain to stop her — and that Darren is after Erin and the kids not only because he wants his wife back and doesn’t want the embarrassment of being exposed as an abuser on the eve of his Congressional campaign, but also because he and his old partner on the police force, who’s still an active-duty cop, conspired to fix a case so a Mexican drug cartel owner wouldn’t be held accountable. Supposedly their connection could be proved by the visa stamp for Mexico in Darren’s passport — and Erin has taken all four of the family passports with her, so Darren has to hunt her down and destroy the incriminating evidence. (It didn’t look all that incriminating to me — just a couple of stamps to indicate he visited Mexico City — but we’ll let that pass.)
Thanks to an ill-advised phone call back home to her boyfriend Jake (Sterling Beaumon), Amy gives away their location and police summoned by Darren and his corrupt ex-partner raid the motel where they’re staying and steal the cheap car Erin bought in a hurry from a used-car lot à la Janet Leigh’s panicked flight early on in Psycho. By towing the car they also recover most of the $6,000 Erin had taken from their joint bank account to finance their escape — they have only $300 left. They end up in a truck-stop parking lot where, after turning down the offer of a ride from a skuzzy trucker with a bushy beard, they hook up with Wes (Trevor Donovan, top-billed), who turns out to be their white knight, driving the three fugitives to Santa Barbara, California and the boat on which Erin’s friend Stacey (Courtney Henggler) and her husband are living, and with whom Erin plans to stay until she gets established. Wes and Erin are also sexually attracted to each other, though they refrain from doing the actual down-’n’-dirty while they’re still on the road. But back in Tulsa Darren worms out of Jake (by holding a gun to his head and telling him that as an ex-cop he can kill him with impunity!) the secret of who Erin was taking herself and the kids to stay with, and director Kohn copies one of the most famous shots from Sleeping with the Enemy: the abusive husband lets his victim wife know he’s there with an object. In Sleeping with the Enemy it was a particular arrangement of towels and canned goods the no-good husband insisted his wife follow at home — or else — and in Escaping Dad it’s that hideous yellow dress Darren had wanted Erin to wear to his party in the opening sequence. There’s a climactic shoot-out in which Erin manages to grab the gun Darren has dropped and kill him with a spectacularly well-aimed shot to the forehead.
There are a few bits of classic Lifetime “milking it” in Adam Balsam’s script — notably the gimmick of having Darren be not only abusive but corrupt, and the even tackier gimmick of making Erin’s younger child diabetic and giving him several nearly fatal insulin shocks during the story — but they’re only minor blemishes on what’s otherwise a superior piece of suspense filmmaking. I particularly liked the plot gimmick that Darren not only puts out an Amber Alert on his wife for allegedly kidnapping the kids (he meets the requirement for an Amber Alert that the kids be in imminent physical danger by saying in his report — falsely — that Erin has taken his gun) but does a TV interview saying that Erin is mentally ill and is therefore a danger both to her children and herself. Later, when Wes asks if there’s any truth to that, Erin tells him she had an unusually long and severe post-partum depression after Charlie was born but she got over it and hasn’t taken or needed anti-depressants since — and in the interview scene Jason Wiles perfectly portrays the surface smarminess and underlying evil. Indeed, all the acting in Escaping Dad is quite good — though as hot and hunky as Trevor Donovan is (yes, folks, Escaping Dad is one of those rare Lifetime movies in which the good guy is considerably sexier than the bad guy), he’s not quite capable of getting us to believe his trucker-with-a-heart-of-gold character. But I did like the bit in which, when they first get into his truck, Erin, Amy and Charlie are less than thrilled with the country music Wes is playing on the radio — “Don’t you like country music?” Wes asks, and Amy snarls back, “Who does?” — though later the three are seen hopping, bopping and hand-dancing to the country songs on Wes’s radio as much or more than he is. Country music triumphs again! And there’s a nice in-joke that the camp Charlie is going to in the opening scenes,and from which Erin takes him, is called “Camp Indy” — after Indy Entertainment, the company that made this film.
Last Sunday Lifetime decided to commemorate Father’s Day by offering a series of movies about vicious, corrupt or contemptible fathers under the rubric “Bad Dads,” and while most of the titles were ones I’d seen before there was one I hadn’t, and it was quite good. It was called Escaping Dad — though it was shot under the working title Amber Alert — and was essentially a mashup of the 1991 theatrical feature Sleeping with the Enemy (directed by Joseph Ruben from a script by Ronald Bass based on a novel by Nancy Price, and starring Julia Roberts as an abused wife and Patrick Bergin as the husband who abuses her) and the 1999 CBS-TV movie Black and Blue (directed by Paul Shapiro from a script by April Smith based on a novel by Anna Quindlen, and starring Mary Stuart Masterson as the abused wife and Anthony LoPaglia as the husband who abuses her). Escaping Dad was written by Adam Balsam and directed by Ross Kohn, and it borrows from Black and Blue the added complication that not only is Darren Lattimer (Jason Wiles, who’s perfectly cast as a man who can maintain appearances as a decent guy in public while his interactions with his wife, whom he bosses around unmercifully, subjects to police-style interrogations about what she’s done during the day and how she’s spent “his” money, and regularly hits her when he finds her answers unsatisfactory) a wife abuser and a sexist pig, he’s also a police officer — or in this case a former police officer who went to law school and is currently the district attorney for Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the film starts out. (It was certainly ironic to be watching a fictional film set in Tulsa when that city has been so much in the news today as the site of President Trump’s comeback rally — which drew disappointingly small crowds — and the Juneteenth counter-protests organized by Black Tulsans to commemorate the end of U.S. slavery.) Darren’s wife Erin (Sunny Mabrey) lives not only in terror of her husband’s abuse but fear of what he’ll do with her two children, teenage daughter Amy (Grace Van Dien) — who’s not Darren’s child but the product of a casual sexual encounter Erin had years before (and of course when Darren tries to boss Amy around she fires back with the classic line, “You’re not my dad!”) and eight-year-old Charlie (Andy Walken), who is Darren’s biological son and also a diabetic who’s regularly going into insulin shocks and needing emergency injections. The film opens at a party Darren is giving to build support and a donor base for his upcoming run for Congress, and Darren gets mad at Erin for not wearing the horribly ugly yellow dress he bought her for the occasion — instead she took one of the family credit cards and bought sexier dresses both for herself and Amy — and she wore red lipstick to the party after he explicitly told her not to.
He punches her out for these bizarre infractions — the contrast between the triviality of her actions and the severity of his punishments is a oft-told tale of real abusive relationships as well — and he also mutters that their marriage is “’til death do us part” (while we’re worried that his actions will bring about her death well ahead of schedule!) and that if she ever tries to leave him, “I’ll hunt you down.” He also says that since he’s the district attorney and an ex-cop besides, if she tries to report him to law enforcement they’ll believe him over her and he’ll get away with whatever he’s done to her. One day it’s all too much for her and she takes the kids — not telling them what’s going on — and flees, after first taking the $6,000 in their joint bank account and changing the password on their computer so he can’t access any information about her. There are various complications, including the fact that Charlie is at a summer camp (given the in-joke name “Camp Indy” — “Indy Entertainment” was the name of the production company that made this film) and she has to fetch him, and the queeny schlub who’s the camp counselor receives Darren’s phone call just as Erin is taking Charlie and tries in vain to stop her — and that Darren is after Erin and the kids not only because he wants his wife back and doesn’t want the embarrassment of being exposed as an abuser on the eve of his Congressional campaign, but also because he and his old partner on the police force, who’s still an active-duty cop, conspired to fix a case so a Mexican drug cartel owner wouldn’t be held accountable. Supposedly their connection could be proved by the visa stamp for Mexico in Darren’s passport — and Erin has taken all four of the family passports with her, so Darren has to hunt her down and destroy the incriminating evidence. (It didn’t look all that incriminating to me — just a couple of stamps to indicate he visited Mexico City — but we’ll let that pass.)
Thanks to an ill-advised phone call back home to her boyfriend Jake (Sterling Beaumon), Amy gives away their location and police summoned by Darren and his corrupt ex-partner raid the motel where they’re staying and steal the cheap car Erin bought in a hurry from a used-car lot à la Janet Leigh’s panicked flight early on in Psycho. By towing the car they also recover most of the $6,000 Erin had taken from their joint bank account to finance their escape — they have only $300 left. They end up in a truck-stop parking lot where, after turning down the offer of a ride from a skuzzy trucker with a bushy beard, they hook up with Wes (Trevor Donovan, top-billed), who turns out to be their white knight, driving the three fugitives to Santa Barbara, California and the boat on which Erin’s friend Stacey (Courtney Henggler) and her husband are living, and with whom Erin plans to stay until she gets established. Wes and Erin are also sexually attracted to each other, though they refrain from doing the actual down-’n’-dirty while they’re still on the road. But back in Tulsa Darren worms out of Jake (by holding a gun to his head and telling him that as an ex-cop he can kill him with impunity!) the secret of who Erin was taking herself and the kids to stay with, and director Kohn copies one of the most famous shots from Sleeping with the Enemy: the abusive husband lets his victim wife know he’s there with an object. In Sleeping with the Enemy it was a particular arrangement of towels and canned goods the no-good husband insisted his wife follow at home — or else — and in Escaping Dad it’s that hideous yellow dress Darren had wanted Erin to wear to his party in the opening sequence. There’s a climactic shoot-out in which Erin manages to grab the gun Darren has dropped and kill him with a spectacularly well-aimed shot to the forehead.
There are a few bits of classic Lifetime “milking it” in Adam Balsam’s script — notably the gimmick of having Darren be not only abusive but corrupt, and the even tackier gimmick of making Erin’s younger child diabetic and giving him several nearly fatal insulin shocks during the story — but they’re only minor blemishes on what’s otherwise a superior piece of suspense filmmaking. I particularly liked the plot gimmick that Darren not only puts out an Amber Alert on his wife for allegedly kidnapping the kids (he meets the requirement for an Amber Alert that the kids be in imminent physical danger by saying in his report — falsely — that Erin has taken his gun) but does a TV interview saying that Erin is mentally ill and is therefore a danger both to her children and herself. Later, when Wes asks if there’s any truth to that, Erin tells him she had an unusually long and severe post-partum depression after Charlie was born but she got over it and hasn’t taken or needed anti-depressants since — and in the interview scene Jason Wiles perfectly portrays the surface smarminess and underlying evil. Indeed, all the acting in Escaping Dad is quite good — though as hot and hunky as Trevor Donovan is (yes, folks, Escaping Dad is one of those rare Lifetime movies in which the good guy is considerably sexier than the bad guy), he’s not quite capable of getting us to believe his trucker-with-a-heart-of-gold character. But I did like the bit in which, when they first get into his truck, Erin, Amy and Charlie are less than thrilled with the country music Wes is playing on the radio — “Don’t you like country music?” Wes asks, and Amy snarls back, “Who does?” — though later the three are seen hopping, bopping and hand-dancing to the country songs on Wes’s radio as much or more than he is. Country music triumphs again! And there’s a nice in-joke that the camp Charlie is going to in the opening scenes,and from which Erin takes him, is called “Camp Indy” — after Indy Entertainment, the company that made this film.
Sunday, June 21, 2020
Birthmother’s Betrayal (Reel One Entertainment, Maple Island Films, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the Lifetime “premiere” movie — and for the third week in a row Lifetime hasn’t supplied any advance information on who made the film or who stars in it, and it’s been up to independent sites like meeaw.com to put what trickle of information is actually available on these films before they aired. So I had to scribble the names of the filmmakers as best I could during the opening credits and hope I got them right. The film was called Birthmother’s Betrayal — the spelling “birthmother” is one of those horrible neologisms, like “healthcare,” that seems to have crept into English via German — and, according to an article on the Web site bustle.com (https://www.bustle.com/p/is-birthmothers-betrayal-based-on-a-true-story-its-caused-some-controversy-22987972), there’ve been hissy-fits about this film from advocacy groups for women who put their babies up for adoption. (You didn’t know there were advocacy groups for women who put their babies up for adoption? Neither did I.)
One such group started an online petition urging Lifetime to take this film off their schedule, claiming, “The upcoming Lifetime movie Birthmother’s Betrayal portrays birthmothers as dangerous and unbalanced women who are mentally unbalanced and unpredictable, and who pose untold risks to both adoptees and adoptive mothers. This sensationalist horror entertainment does a vast disservice to the tens of thousands of adoptees and adoptive families nationwide who enjoy positive, safe, lifelong open adoption relationships.” (“Yeah, and their little dogs, too,” I can’t help but joke in response.) Aside from the sheer obviousness of describing a Lifetime movie as “sensationalist horror entertainment” (if it weren’t for sensationalist horror entertainment, what would Lifetime be able to fill its schedule with? Cooking shows?), it’s rather unfair to the movie, which obviously the petition’s author(s) were describing without having seen it. I remember getting into the politics of adoption when I did a Zenger’s Newsmagazine cover story with Patrick McMahon, Becoming Patrick, about his search for his birth family while he was a young adult, and I’ve followed (and largely agree with) the changes in the law that have made it easier for adopted kids to trace their birth families and find out who, biologically, they really are — especially since there’s been an increase in medical science’s knowledge about hereditary diseases and as a society we’ve understood that you need to know something about who you are and who your natural family is so you can be warned if you have a genetic disease and take whatever steps are available not to become symptomatic.
Birthmother’s Betrayal begins with Amy Bennett (Tanya Clarke), oohing and aahing about the baby girl she’s just been allowed to adopt, Tara (after just watching Gone with the Wind it was jarring to see another movie featuring the name “Tara,” especially since here it’s a person instead of a place!), while Barbara, the official in charge of the adoption agency that placed Tara with her, says her application and home visit were the best they’ve ever had. Then Amy casually inquires about the birth mother, and Barbara gives her a stern warning that because of certain “issues” it would be “unsafe” for Amy to try to contact her. Then we see someone else following Amy in her car — we assume she’s Tara’s birth mother because she has a stack of diapers in her car — only just when she’s about to catch up to Amy’s car a police car pulls up in front of her, blocking her way. The officer orders her to get out of the car and immediately arrests her for murder. Then we get a title chyron readling, “Sixteen Years Later,” and 16 years later Tara is a junior in high school and she lives with Amy and her partner David (Matthew Pohlkamp, a bit sexier than the tall, lanky men Lifetime usually casts in their sympathetic male roles) — who, rather oddly for a Lifetime leading man, has been living with Amy since Tara was in the third grade but they haven’t actually got married. Tara is encouraged to search for her birth mother by her best friend Jenna, who was also adopted, did a search, found her birth mother and is now quite happy with having two moms.
Jenna tells Tara about a genetic search site called DNAndMe (an obvious ripoff of the real “23 and Me,” named after the number of chromosomes in a human gene), and Tara secretly sends a sample to this company and comes up with a maternal match to Grace Culver (Aria Pullman). The contact information includes a phone number, which Tara texts to, and eventually the two women meet. Grace turns out to be a good pal, who lets Tara do things her adoptive mother hasn’t yet — like drive — and had writers J. Emilio Martinez (story) and Huelah Lander (script) built their story around the antagonism between a fiercely protective, indeed overprotective, adoptive mother and a more freewheeling birth mom who lets Tara spread her wings more but also puts her in danger, they and John Murlowski (who’s listed as co-producer, director and cinematographer) would have had a much richer, more complex and more interesting film. Instead of a slow buildup in which Grace would have seemed like a nice person from the get-go and we would have been dropped hints that she was dangerously crazy, we keep getting reminded that she’s psycho: not only have we seen her arrested for murder shortly after she gave Tara up, she knocks off a blonde woman who was her cellmate in prison when the blonde woman, Michelle, comes up to her in the street while Grace is in her car. Grace kills Michelle by opening the car door and thereby knocking her into the path of an SUV whose driver runs her down, then stops and futilely calls out to Grace to stay as Grace leaves. Later on, when Grace learns that Amy has contacted Barbara from the adoption agency seeking their written records on Grace, Grace breaks into the storeroom where Barbara has gone to fetch the records and kills her with a tire iron. (Blunt objects seem to be the favorite means of murder in this movie: a lot of people get clonged to death, or nearly so, by garden shovels.)
She also spikes Amy’s morning coffee as Amy drives off to work, and apparently for good measure sabotages the brakes in Amy’s car, so when she tries to pull over and stop she can’t. Amy crashes her car into a tree, the police give her a sobriety test, and ultimately cite her for DUI while Grace films the whole thing on her smartphone and posts it online, where it’s apparently accessed by the entire student body at Tara’s high school. There’s one scene about midway through in which, while Grace is at the home of Amy and Tara, she’s stalked herself by, you guessed it, yet another mysterious stranger in a black hoodie (though at least this time director Murlowski lets cinematographer Murlowski bring the camera close enough that we can see it’s a woman — a lot of times Lifetime clads sinister killers in black hoodies so we can’t see what gender they are) who follows her after she leaves Grace’s home. About half an hour before the movie ends we see this woman accost Grace and we realize [Surprise! Spoiler alert!] that the two women look exactly alike because they’re identical twin sisters. The sister’s name is Karina and she is the one who was stalking Amy and baby Tara in the opening scene until she was arrested for murder. She’s also the one who killed Michelle the hard-bitten cellmate (I wish I knew who the actress who played Michelle was because she makes an indelible impression even though she’s only in that one brief scene) and Barbara the head of the adoption agency, and now … well, it’s not immediately clear what she’s going to do but her ultimate aim seems to be to kill Amy, Amy’s partner David (ya remember Amy’s partner David?) and her own sister Grace, and spirit Tara off to Costa Rica to raise her as her own for the next two years of Tara’s minority.
The special-effects work to allow Aria Pullman to play both sisters is quite convincing — but it was done just as well 74 years ago in the 1946 film A Stolen Life, directed by Curtis Bernhardt at Warner Bros. and starring Bette Davis as a good sister whose boyfriend (Glenn Ford) is seduced away from her by her bad sister; then the two are on a boat together, bad sister drowns when the boat sinks and good sister swims back to shore and poses as bad sister to win back the man she’s always loved. (I suspect Murlowski did the two-shots the same way Bernhardt did: with a double who kept her back to the camera while Pullman faced it as whichever sister she was supposed to be.) Karina lures all the other principals to Grace’s house (once we’re told that it was Karina, not Grace, who served that 15-year murder sentence, we’re left totally hanging about what the real Grace was doing in the meantime while Amy was raising her daughter) and starts by tying Grace up to a chair in the basement and force-feeding her drugs so she can’t interfere — then she surprises David (again, ya remember David?) and clongs him over the head with a shovel, and ultimately there’s a big fight in the front yard in which Grace finally comes to and tries to come to the aid of Amy and Tara — only by this time we’re confused as to which sister is which. Since Martinez and Lander had previously established that Grace is prone to dizzy spells because her blood has too much iron in it (too much iron — there’s a switch!), I had assumed this was a classic screenwriters’ “plant” and Grace would go dizzy at the crucial moment, thereby telling Amy and Tara which one they should protect and which one they should subdue — but somehow Tara just seems to intuit which is the bad sister and grabs that omnipresent shovel, knocking her out until the police arrive. The finale occurs back at Amy’s and David’s home, where the two are finally going to tie the knot legally and spend the next two weeks on honeymoon in Hawai’i, while Grace looks after Tara.
Birthmother’s Betrayal is that most frustrating sort of mediocre movie — one which could have been really good with more thought in the writing and overall conception — though that previously-unknown-twin-sister bit is a bit hard to take. The acting is also variable: Aria Pullman is great in both roles — though the trick gimmick prevents Martinez and Lander from differentiating the sisters enough to give her a real challenge and an opportunity to create two different characters — but Tanya Phillips is pretty much your standard-issue overprotective Lifetime mom, Matthew Pohlkamp your standard-issue decent but hapless Lifetime dad, and Monica Rose Belz is by far the weakest link in this cast. She’s totally unable to project any character at all; she just walks through this movie as if numb, and I can’t help but think the casting director, Jeff Ardrich, could have found another girl the right age for this part who might actually have been able to do something with it. Birthmother’s Betrayal is an O.K. Lifetime movie that could have been really good — the basic situation had the potential for it — though whoever the activists were who were upset at the way it portrayed birth mothers of adopted kids probably should at least have seen the movie before they had their public hissy-fit about it, since not only does it portray a girl who has a positive experience meeting her birth mother after growing up adopted, the real villainess turns out not to be the birth mother but the birth aunt. Just a couple of notes: though the film is supposed to be set in California (judging from the California license plate on Grace’s car) it was really shot in Canada (in the early scene, the warning label on the car safety seat in which Amy takes Tara home is in French). And there's what imdb.com would call a continuity goof: the name of Tara’s birth dad is given as “Peter Shepard” on Tara’s birth certificate and “Peter Sheppard” on his tombstone.
Last night I watched the Lifetime “premiere” movie — and for the third week in a row Lifetime hasn’t supplied any advance information on who made the film or who stars in it, and it’s been up to independent sites like meeaw.com to put what trickle of information is actually available on these films before they aired. So I had to scribble the names of the filmmakers as best I could during the opening credits and hope I got them right. The film was called Birthmother’s Betrayal — the spelling “birthmother” is one of those horrible neologisms, like “healthcare,” that seems to have crept into English via German — and, according to an article on the Web site bustle.com (https://www.bustle.com/p/is-birthmothers-betrayal-based-on-a-true-story-its-caused-some-controversy-22987972), there’ve been hissy-fits about this film from advocacy groups for women who put their babies up for adoption. (You didn’t know there were advocacy groups for women who put their babies up for adoption? Neither did I.)
One such group started an online petition urging Lifetime to take this film off their schedule, claiming, “The upcoming Lifetime movie Birthmother’s Betrayal portrays birthmothers as dangerous and unbalanced women who are mentally unbalanced and unpredictable, and who pose untold risks to both adoptees and adoptive mothers. This sensationalist horror entertainment does a vast disservice to the tens of thousands of adoptees and adoptive families nationwide who enjoy positive, safe, lifelong open adoption relationships.” (“Yeah, and their little dogs, too,” I can’t help but joke in response.) Aside from the sheer obviousness of describing a Lifetime movie as “sensationalist horror entertainment” (if it weren’t for sensationalist horror entertainment, what would Lifetime be able to fill its schedule with? Cooking shows?), it’s rather unfair to the movie, which obviously the petition’s author(s) were describing without having seen it. I remember getting into the politics of adoption when I did a Zenger’s Newsmagazine cover story with Patrick McMahon, Becoming Patrick, about his search for his birth family while he was a young adult, and I’ve followed (and largely agree with) the changes in the law that have made it easier for adopted kids to trace their birth families and find out who, biologically, they really are — especially since there’s been an increase in medical science’s knowledge about hereditary diseases and as a society we’ve understood that you need to know something about who you are and who your natural family is so you can be warned if you have a genetic disease and take whatever steps are available not to become symptomatic.
Birthmother’s Betrayal begins with Amy Bennett (Tanya Clarke), oohing and aahing about the baby girl she’s just been allowed to adopt, Tara (after just watching Gone with the Wind it was jarring to see another movie featuring the name “Tara,” especially since here it’s a person instead of a place!), while Barbara, the official in charge of the adoption agency that placed Tara with her, says her application and home visit were the best they’ve ever had. Then Amy casually inquires about the birth mother, and Barbara gives her a stern warning that because of certain “issues” it would be “unsafe” for Amy to try to contact her. Then we see someone else following Amy in her car — we assume she’s Tara’s birth mother because she has a stack of diapers in her car — only just when she’s about to catch up to Amy’s car a police car pulls up in front of her, blocking her way. The officer orders her to get out of the car and immediately arrests her for murder. Then we get a title chyron readling, “Sixteen Years Later,” and 16 years later Tara is a junior in high school and she lives with Amy and her partner David (Matthew Pohlkamp, a bit sexier than the tall, lanky men Lifetime usually casts in their sympathetic male roles) — who, rather oddly for a Lifetime leading man, has been living with Amy since Tara was in the third grade but they haven’t actually got married. Tara is encouraged to search for her birth mother by her best friend Jenna, who was also adopted, did a search, found her birth mother and is now quite happy with having two moms.
Jenna tells Tara about a genetic search site called DNAndMe (an obvious ripoff of the real “23 and Me,” named after the number of chromosomes in a human gene), and Tara secretly sends a sample to this company and comes up with a maternal match to Grace Culver (Aria Pullman). The contact information includes a phone number, which Tara texts to, and eventually the two women meet. Grace turns out to be a good pal, who lets Tara do things her adoptive mother hasn’t yet — like drive — and had writers J. Emilio Martinez (story) and Huelah Lander (script) built their story around the antagonism between a fiercely protective, indeed overprotective, adoptive mother and a more freewheeling birth mom who lets Tara spread her wings more but also puts her in danger, they and John Murlowski (who’s listed as co-producer, director and cinematographer) would have had a much richer, more complex and more interesting film. Instead of a slow buildup in which Grace would have seemed like a nice person from the get-go and we would have been dropped hints that she was dangerously crazy, we keep getting reminded that she’s psycho: not only have we seen her arrested for murder shortly after she gave Tara up, she knocks off a blonde woman who was her cellmate in prison when the blonde woman, Michelle, comes up to her in the street while Grace is in her car. Grace kills Michelle by opening the car door and thereby knocking her into the path of an SUV whose driver runs her down, then stops and futilely calls out to Grace to stay as Grace leaves. Later on, when Grace learns that Amy has contacted Barbara from the adoption agency seeking their written records on Grace, Grace breaks into the storeroom where Barbara has gone to fetch the records and kills her with a tire iron. (Blunt objects seem to be the favorite means of murder in this movie: a lot of people get clonged to death, or nearly so, by garden shovels.)
She also spikes Amy’s morning coffee as Amy drives off to work, and apparently for good measure sabotages the brakes in Amy’s car, so when she tries to pull over and stop she can’t. Amy crashes her car into a tree, the police give her a sobriety test, and ultimately cite her for DUI while Grace films the whole thing on her smartphone and posts it online, where it’s apparently accessed by the entire student body at Tara’s high school. There’s one scene about midway through in which, while Grace is at the home of Amy and Tara, she’s stalked herself by, you guessed it, yet another mysterious stranger in a black hoodie (though at least this time director Murlowski lets cinematographer Murlowski bring the camera close enough that we can see it’s a woman — a lot of times Lifetime clads sinister killers in black hoodies so we can’t see what gender they are) who follows her after she leaves Grace’s home. About half an hour before the movie ends we see this woman accost Grace and we realize [Surprise! Spoiler alert!] that the two women look exactly alike because they’re identical twin sisters. The sister’s name is Karina and she is the one who was stalking Amy and baby Tara in the opening scene until she was arrested for murder. She’s also the one who killed Michelle the hard-bitten cellmate (I wish I knew who the actress who played Michelle was because she makes an indelible impression even though she’s only in that one brief scene) and Barbara the head of the adoption agency, and now … well, it’s not immediately clear what she’s going to do but her ultimate aim seems to be to kill Amy, Amy’s partner David (ya remember Amy’s partner David?) and her own sister Grace, and spirit Tara off to Costa Rica to raise her as her own for the next two years of Tara’s minority.
The special-effects work to allow Aria Pullman to play both sisters is quite convincing — but it was done just as well 74 years ago in the 1946 film A Stolen Life, directed by Curtis Bernhardt at Warner Bros. and starring Bette Davis as a good sister whose boyfriend (Glenn Ford) is seduced away from her by her bad sister; then the two are on a boat together, bad sister drowns when the boat sinks and good sister swims back to shore and poses as bad sister to win back the man she’s always loved. (I suspect Murlowski did the two-shots the same way Bernhardt did: with a double who kept her back to the camera while Pullman faced it as whichever sister she was supposed to be.) Karina lures all the other principals to Grace’s house (once we’re told that it was Karina, not Grace, who served that 15-year murder sentence, we’re left totally hanging about what the real Grace was doing in the meantime while Amy was raising her daughter) and starts by tying Grace up to a chair in the basement and force-feeding her drugs so she can’t interfere — then she surprises David (again, ya remember David?) and clongs him over the head with a shovel, and ultimately there’s a big fight in the front yard in which Grace finally comes to and tries to come to the aid of Amy and Tara — only by this time we’re confused as to which sister is which. Since Martinez and Lander had previously established that Grace is prone to dizzy spells because her blood has too much iron in it (too much iron — there’s a switch!), I had assumed this was a classic screenwriters’ “plant” and Grace would go dizzy at the crucial moment, thereby telling Amy and Tara which one they should protect and which one they should subdue — but somehow Tara just seems to intuit which is the bad sister and grabs that omnipresent shovel, knocking her out until the police arrive. The finale occurs back at Amy’s and David’s home, where the two are finally going to tie the knot legally and spend the next two weeks on honeymoon in Hawai’i, while Grace looks after Tara.
Birthmother’s Betrayal is that most frustrating sort of mediocre movie — one which could have been really good with more thought in the writing and overall conception — though that previously-unknown-twin-sister bit is a bit hard to take. The acting is also variable: Aria Pullman is great in both roles — though the trick gimmick prevents Martinez and Lander from differentiating the sisters enough to give her a real challenge and an opportunity to create two different characters — but Tanya Phillips is pretty much your standard-issue overprotective Lifetime mom, Matthew Pohlkamp your standard-issue decent but hapless Lifetime dad, and Monica Rose Belz is by far the weakest link in this cast. She’s totally unable to project any character at all; she just walks through this movie as if numb, and I can’t help but think the casting director, Jeff Ardrich, could have found another girl the right age for this part who might actually have been able to do something with it. Birthmother’s Betrayal is an O.K. Lifetime movie that could have been really good — the basic situation had the potential for it — though whoever the activists were who were upset at the way it portrayed birth mothers of adopted kids probably should at least have seen the movie before they had their public hissy-fit about it, since not only does it portray a girl who has a positive experience meeting her birth mother after growing up adopted, the real villainess turns out not to be the birth mother but the birth aunt. Just a couple of notes: though the film is supposed to be set in California (judging from the California license plate on Grace’s car) it was really shot in Canada (in the early scene, the warning label on the car safety seat in which Amy takes Tara home is in French). And there's what imdb.com would call a continuity goof: the name of Tara’s birth dad is given as “Peter Shepard” on Tara’s birth certificate and “Peter Sheppard” on his tombstone.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Gone with the Wind (Selznick International/MGM, 1939)
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“Just like a flame,
Love burned brightly, then
became
An empty smoke dream that is
gone with the wind.”
—
Herb Magidson and Allie Wrubel, “Gone with the Wind” (1937 song)
I’ll say one
thing right off: I am hugely opposed to censorship in any way, shape or form.
I’m a First Amendment absolutist who thinks the remedy for bad speech is good
speech, not speech suppression. That’s why I was horrified when I read the
commentary by John Ridley, writer-director of the film 12 Years a Slave, in the June 8 Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-08/hbo-max-racism-gone-with-the-wind-movie)
demanding that the new HBO Max streaming service pull the 1939 film Gone
with the Wind off their site “temporarily”
and not restore it without some sort of front-and-back content explaining that
the film’s rosy view of the pre-Civil War South’s “peculiar institution” of
slavery was nothing like the real deal.
Two other
commentators added articles to the Times’
op-ed section. One, Carla Hall (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-10/gone-with-the-wind-hbo),
which only appeared on the Times’
Web site, argued (as I would) that Gone with the Wind may be racist, but it should not be suppressed. Another author, Pamela Jackson (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-12/gone-with-the-wind-hattie-mcdaniel-john-ridley),
wrote in a column published June 12 that she didn’t like Gone with
the Wind either, but suppressing it would
deprive HBO Max viewers of seeing Hattie McDaniel’s acting as Mammy — the first
performance by an African-American actor to win an Academy Award. (There
wouldn’t be a second until Sidney Poitier won for Lilies of the Field a quarter-century later.)
So on Monday, June 14 I decided to screen Gone with the Wind, all nearly four hours of it, for my husband and I. I ran the movie at
least in part as a fuck-you to all the P.C. Thought Police types who want to
suppress it “temporarily” and slap on it explanatory content to the effect that
the “Southern Way of Life” was based on white people literally owning Black people as slaves. The calls to ban (at
least “temporarily,” though such “temporary” censorship has a way of becoming
permanent) Gone with the Wind led
me to an ire-filled letter to the Los Angeles Times protesting the suppression of an acknowledged
American classic film — which they actually printed last Saturday, June 12,
along with two other letters defending the suppression. I suspect the defenders
of the ban haven’t actually seen Gone with the Wind in years — as I hadn’t either — and their memories,
like mine, don’t really match the film Charles and I just watched last night.
Like all major
movies, Gone with the Wind involved a
huge number of people in its manufacture, but there were two particular
individuals who had more than any others to do with creating this film. One was
Margaret Mitchell, a Southern woman who had briefly tried her hand at
journalism and playwrighting until she married her second husband, John Marsh.
Bored with life as a housewife, she started using her spare time to write a
book about the tales and legends of the Old South before and during the Civil
War. As a girl, she’d been taken by her family to see old Civil War
battlefields and monuments, and she’d got such an earful about the so-called
“Lost Cause” that for much of her childhood she hadn’t believed that the cause
had been lost: it was not until she was 10 that she realized the South had lost the Civil War.
Mitchell spent
10 years, 1926-1936, writing Gone with the Wind. Instead of working on the novel straight through, start to finish,
she divided it into chapters, put each chapter in a manila envelope, and filed
them in the order in which they would appear. That way she could work on
whatever section pleased her fancy instead of writing the story in the order in
which it took place. It’s not clear whether she originally intended the novel
for publication, but that decision was forced on her when John Marsh invited a
vacationing literary agent from New York to dinner at their home in Atlanta.
Over dinner, the agent lamented that he hadn’t seen any worthwhile manuscripts
in a while and asked Marsh if he knew anyone who was writing. “Well, my wife is
working on something,” Marsh said — and the agent got hold of three of
Mitchell’s manila envelopes, copied their contents and immediately decided
Mitchell’s manuscript had the makings of a blockbuster best-seller and possibly
a film adaptation as well.
The other
individual primarily responsible for the film Gone with the Wind was producer David O. Selznick. He had begun in the
late 1920’s and had risen fast through the movie industry, including stints at
Paramount, RKO and MGM before he left in late 1935 to form his own studio,
Selznick International. When Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind came out he immediately saw its film possibilities
and determined to grab the movie rights, even though he also had doubts about
the ability of his independent company to get the money to mount a production
of the size and scope that would do justice to the novel. Selznick also did
something highly unusual at the time: he hired George Gallup’s survey research
film to study movie audiences and find who they wanted to play the principal
roles in Gone with the Wind.
The result was
an overwhelming vote — about 65 percent — for Clark Gable to play the book’s
rakish leading male character, Rhett Buttler. At the time Gable was the leading
adult moneymaker in Hollywood (the top star in the business was the little girl
with the long curls, Shirley Temple) and the main attraction for Selznick’s
father-in-law and former employer, MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer.
Regarding the story’s female lead, Scarlett O’Hara, about one-third of Gallup’s
respondents wanted Bette Davis to play her — but, as Selznick recalled later,
there was just as much opposition as support for Davis in the role. Though
Selznick had finished his deal for the movie rights to Gone with the Wind in 1936, he soon learned that Mayer would allow
Gable to make Gone with the Wind
only if MGM’s parent company, Loew’s Incorporated, released the film. Selznick
had a distribution deal with United Artists that didn’t expire until the end of
1938, so he somehow had to maintain audience interest in a story he wouldn’t be
able to film for another three years.
Selznick’s
strategy was to hire a public relations genius named Russell Birdwell to launch
an ongoing publicity stunt called “The Search for Scarlett O’Hara.” Virtually
every actress in the U.S., and some from outside it as well, got to read for
the role, and Selznick had so many screen tests shot he ended up with 24 hours’
worth of them. A number of actresses more or less impressed Selznick, but it
wasn’t until December 21, 1938 that he found the woman he finally cast. His
brother, agent Myron Selznick, had signed a young British actress named Vivien
Leigh as a client, and on that fateful day he took her to the fire on
Selznick’s back lot — needing a sequence showing Union General William Tecumseh
Sherman burning down Atlanta, David Selznick had decided to gather up all the
standing sets on his backlot, pass them off as Atlanta and burn them for real
to clear the space for the big sets he needed for Gone with the Wind — and as the flames of the faux Atlanta burned around them, Myron walked up to David
and said, “Meet Scarlett O’Hara.”
Gone with the
Wind is probably the most documented
production in the history of filmmaking, at least partly due to Selznick’s
habit of writing down memos to his directors, writers and production staff to
make sure they understood what he wanted from them. Selznick’s memos and the
other surviving documents and interviews with people involved in the production
make it clear that he was deliberately setting out to make not only the
greatest movie that had been made to that time but the greatest that would ever
be made. He insisted that the
film be shot in three-strip Technicolor at a time when making a film in color
doubled its production cost. Louis B. Mayer tried to talk him out of using
color on the ground that the attractions were Gable and Mitchell’s bestselling
book and the film wouldn’t make a dime more in color than it would in
black-and-white. “I know, but the story demands color,” Selznick told Mayer — and Selznick was right
not only artistically but financially. Gone with the Wind continued to be shown theatrically long after color
films had become standard, lasting longer as a commercial property than it
would have in black-and-white.
Selznick scoured
the studios of Hollywood for the best actors to cast in the other roles as
well. He got British free-lancer Leslie Howard to play Ashley Wilkes,
Scarlett’s unrequited love interest, even though the 40-something Howard had
already been savaged by critics for playing Romeo in MGM’s 1936 film of Romeo
and Juliet and was reluctant to play
another character so much younger than he was for real. He borrowed Olivia de
Havilland from Warner Bros. to play Melanie Hamilton, Scarlett’s friend and the
woman Ashley finally marries and stays with through the rest of the story. He
cast veteran character actors Thomas Mitchell and Barbara O’Neil as Scarlett’s
parents, and for the principal Black role of the O’Haras’ house slave Mammy, he
got Hattie McDaniel, whose authority and power throughout the film made her a
worthy choice even in a stereotypical role. McDaniel was often criticized for
playing maids, to which she replied, “I have a choice — I can make $500 a week
playing a maid or $5 a day being one.”
Selznick also
relentlessly platooned people in and out of the behind-the-camera roles. For
the three years of preparation and the opening weeks of shooting he used George
Cukor as director — until, under pressure from Clark Gable, who thought the Gay
Cukor would turn the film into a “women’s picture,” Selznick fired Cukor and
replaced him with Gable’s friend and hunting buddy Victor Fleming. Later, when
Fleming had a nervous breakdown and was out for a couple of weeks, Selznick
hired Sam Wood — and when Fleming recovered he kept Wood on and had two
separate units shooting scenes for the film with different actors at the same
time. Though the first writer Selznick hired to adapt the book, Sidney Howard,
got sole screen credit, he put many other writers to tweak the script —
including Oliver H. P. Garrett, Jo Swerling, John Van Druten, Ben Hecht (who
wrote the fustian title cards that gave the audience important information
about the progress of the Civil War) and, briefly, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Selznick also fired his initial director of photography, Lee Garmes, and
borrowed Bette Davis’s favorite cinematographer, Ernest Haller, from Warner
Bros. to replace him, largely because he didn’t think the colors in Garmes’
work were bright enough.
When Gone
with the Wind was finally released it broke
all box-office records, becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time and
retaining that status until the release of The Sound of Music in 1965. Indeed, if you simply count the number of
times people have paid to see it instead of trying to count how much they paid and then adjust for inflation (a
particularly difficult way to measure a film like Gone with the Wind which has had many theatrical re-releases in widely
varying economic contexts), Gone with the Wind is still
the most popular film of all time. It is a movie that set standards for what a
mainstream Hollywood production could be, and for decades after it was made was
held up as a sort of gold standard for artistic excellence as well as
commercial appeal. But it was also a film that bought into a lot of the
mythmaking Southern whites created about the Civil War in their efforts to
reverse their military defeat and return Southern Blacks to the status of a
permanent servant class, which they did successfully until the explosion of
Black civil-rights activism in the 1960’s. And it’s that mythmaking that is at
the heart of the current demand to suppress Gone with the Wind.
The Soft Racism of the
“Lost Cause”
“There was a
land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South … Here in this pretty
world Gallantry took its last bow … Here was the last ever to be seen of
Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave … Look for it only in
books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the
wind … ”
—
Ben Hecht, opening title card, Gone with the Wind
To understand
the racial politics of Gone with the Wind
it’s important to understand both what they are and what they are not. In 1915 pioneering filmmaker D. W. Griffith had
made an even more openly and blatantly racist depiction of the Civil War and
its aftermath than Gone with the Wind. It was called The Birth of a Nation and is an even bigger problem for film scholars than
Gone with the Wind because it was
a pioneering work, an indispensable subject for film students because it was
the first feature-length film of real artistic integrity and power. It was the
film in which Griffith brought together all the experimental techniques he’d
been working on in his previous shorts — close-ups, panoramic shots, dramatic
intercutting to show two events happening in different locales at the same time
— and he established the basic grammar of film its directors have used ever
since.
The Birth of
a Nation was also a politically disgusting
piece of racist propaganda in which Black characters were shown getting elected
to Southern state legislatures (as part of a plot instigated by Northern white
“carpetbaggers”) and rolling their eyes, playing craps and devouring
watermelons on the legislative floors. When they’re not doing that, their main
preoccupation is chasing after virginal, innocent white Southern women with rape
(and worse) in their eyes. To add injury to insult, Griffith cast all his
“Black” characters with white actors in hideously unconvincing blackface. The
heroes of The Birth of a Nation are
the Ku Klux Klan, who not only force the Blacks to give up their guns and their
votes but ride to the rescue of white womanhood in an exciting climax that,
though the film was silent, Griffith stipulated be accompanied by Wagner’s
“Ride of the Valkyries.”
Though the NAACP
and other civil rights groups protested The Birth of a Nation from its release (and even before that they’d
picketed the same story, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, when it was done on stage as a play), Virginia-born
President Woodrow Wilson praised it as “history written in lightning” and
added, “And the worst thing is it is all so terribly true.” Not only was Wilson
the President, he had previously been a professor of American history and
political science, so his praise gave The Birth of a Nation an historical imprimatur that was reflected in the literature of the time.
Had anyone in 1915 seen The Birth of a Nation or heard about the controversy surrounding it, and
wondered, “Is it historically accurate?,” the books available in public
libraries at the time would have said it was.
Indeed, The
Birth of a Nation directly inspired a
revival of the Ku Klux Klan that became more powerful and influential than the
original had been — and not just in the South, either. By 1924 the Klan had
elected so many officials in Indiana they had essentially seized control of its
government. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention a resolution to denounce
the Klan failed by one vote. In 1927 the Klan staged a protest against racial
equality in New York City and seven people were arrested. One of the Klansmen
taken into custody that day was Fred Trump, father of the current President,
which sheds an interesting light on Donald Trump’s calls for “law and order”
and for the military to “dominate the streets” of American cities during an era
of mass protests for racial
equality and justice.
Gone with the
Wind is not The Birth of a Nation. David O. Selznick worked hard to soften the racism
of the original material. He’d experienced the controversy over The
Birth of a Nation firsthand because his
father had been one of its distributors, and he said in one of his copious
memos during the making of Gone with the Wind that he’d been offered the remake rights to The
Birth of a Nation but had turned them down
because he didn’t want to reawaken the controversy over a story that openly
glorified the Ku Klux Klan. The most problematic scene in Gone with
the Wind is the one in which Scarlett
drives her carriage through a low-brow area at night and is assaulted by both
white and Black miscreants. She is rescued by her old Black foreman Sam (Everett
Brown) and then avenged by a raiding party organized in a so-called “political
meeting” led by her then-husband, Frank Kennedy (Carroll Nye), who gets
conveniently killed. In Mitchell’s book that mysterious “political meeting” was
a Klan meeting.
The Birth of
a Nation can be described as a “hard”
racist film and Gone with the Wind
as a “soft” racist film. Gone with the Wind doesn’t contain the scenes of maniacal, slavering
Blacks just itching to rape Southern white women that weighed down The
Birth of a Nation. It also doesn’t present
the Ku Klux Klan at all, much less depict them as heroes. What it does do is soft-pedal the fundamental injustice of
slavery. Indeed, it barely mentions slavery at all; though Hecht’s written
prologue, quoted above, uses the S-word, the opening credits euphemistically
list the characters the film’s Black actors play as “servants.”
There are a few
explicit references to the slave status of the Black characters — like when
Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) threatens Prissy (Butterfly McQueen, whose voice
I had always assumed was a “trick” one she’d created for the character until
she was interviewed in a 1980’s making-of documentary and she sounded exactly
the same) with being “sold South.” It was a common threat owners made to rebellious
or insubordinate slaves to sell them from their plantations in Virginia or the
Carolinas or the so-called “border states” (the ones that had slavery but
didn’t secede) like Maryland to the presumably even harsher and nastier
conditions in the Deep South, though given that Gone with the Wind is set in Georgia it’s something of a mystery how
much farther south Scarlett could sell her. There’s also a curious scene taking
place between the end of the Civil War in April 1865 and the death of Scarlett’s
father that December in which he tells her she’s being too nice to the Black
characters and needs to treat them more harshly to maintain their subservience.
Gone with the
Wind is certainly a racist movie, but the
racism in it is “soft,” the sort of “Lost Cause” retrospective glorification
and whitewashing of slavery as a beneficent, paternal institution begun by
Southern journalist Edward Pollard in an 1866 book he actually called The
Lost Cause, in which he wrote:
We shall not
enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery. But we may suggest
a doubt here whether that odious term “slavery” which has been so long imposed,
by the exaggeration of Northern writers, upon the judgment and sympathies of
the world, is properly applied to that system of servitude in the South, which
was really the mildest in the world; which did not rest on acts of debasement
and disenfranchisement, but elevated the African, and was in the interest of
human improvement; and which, by the law of the land, protected the negro in
life and limb, and in many personal rights, and, by the practice of the system,
bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences, which made him altogether
the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment.
It’s not like we
didn’t know better. The evils of American slavery had been documented decades
before in accounts by Northern researchers and activists and at least one white
Southerner, Angelina Grimke. She was the daughter of a Southern planter and
slaveowner whose religious convictions led her to reject the “Peculiar
Institution.” In 1838 she published a book called American Slavery As It Is which documented, among other things, how often
recalcitrant or rebellious slaves were punished by being starved, beaten or
whipped. The realities of slavery were exposed in books by former slaves,
including the most famous one, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass,
published in 1845 with the provocative words “Written by Himself” on the title
page — a challenge to the whole idea that Black people were inferior to whites
and therefore deserved and even benefited from slavery. How, Douglass’s title
page said, can you justify enslaving a whole race when at least one of them can
write a book?
The most famous
anti-slavery book written before the Civil War was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. She started publishing it as a
newspaper serial in 1851 and brought it out as a book in 1852. The first
edition sold 300,000 copies — more than any other novel to that time — and was so influential
that when Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in the White House in 1862 he told her, “So
you’re the little lady whose book started this Great War?” Though later
generations of Black people regarded Stowe’s slave characters as themselves
stereotypical and insulting, Uncle Tom’s Cabin set the template for anti-slavery stories — including
naming the white overseers, who directly supervised the slaves and ordered the
whippings and other punishments, as the real villains of slavery.
There’s an
interesting reflection of the villainous-overseer stereotype in Gone with
the Wind. The overseer on the O’Haras’
plantation, Tara, is Jonas Wilkerson (Victor Jory), a Northern transplant who
runs the plantation and essentially gives the O’Haras plausible deniability for
anything bad that happens to their slaves. He disappears during the Civil War
and later returns during Reconstruction as a Northern carpetbagger who tries to
take a leading role in the government of Georgia. Wilkerson even engineers a
$300 tax increase on Tara in the hope that Scarlett will default on the tax
bill and he will be able to buy Tara at auction.
Certainly Gone
with the Wind is part of the “Lost Cause”
mythology that, among other things, put up all those statues of Robert E. Lee
and other “heroes” of the Confederate rebellion that are now being fought over
and toppled — legally or otherwise — today. They were meant to send a message
to Black Southerners, “We may have lost the war, but we won the peace. You’re
back where you belong; you are our workforce and we are your masters, and
that’s as it should be.” Belaboring the racial politics of a movie that is far
more about the romantic and business intrigues of its white characters than the
condition of its Black ones is somewhat beside the point — though it’s occurred
to me that the current descendants of Hattie McDaniel’s “Mammy” role are the
Black urban professionals in Lifetime movies, who may have careers and
responsibilities but are still there to try to talk the white characters out of
the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all.
Yes, Gone
with the Wind is a problematic film,
Certainly, as I conceded in my Los Angeles Times letter opposing HBO Max’s censorship, it “portrays
slavery in a benign light, and it could not be remade today without a major
rewrite to dramatize the horrors of slavery and include multidimensional Black
characters.” It shouldn’t be taken as a serious piece of Civil War
historiography, even in a fictional context. It should be acknowledged as a
work of its time. But it also should not be censored, especially since it is a
landmark in film history and, though artistically as well as politically
flawed, a worthy piece of entertainment and the kind of thematically broad
epic, appealing to many different kinds of audience, today’s movie business
seems to have forgotten how to make.
Feminist Heroine or
Rape-Culture Victim?
In the 20 to 30
years (I can’t remember which) since the last time I’d seen Gone with the
Wind I’d remembered it as a feminist
parable whose progressive gender politics had at least partly made up for its
terrible racial ones. Indeed, in my Los Angeles Times letter defending the film I had written that Gone
with the Wind “presents a heroine who grows
from a shallow schemer into a woman of strength and power.” Now, however, I’m
not so sure; though Scarlett O’Hara has a fascinating character arc — spoiled
rich bitch who toys with men loses her wealth and social standing as her side
loses a war, then gains it all back again through her own grit and
determination — the gender politics of Gone with the Wind, though nowhere nearly as problematic as its racial
politics, still mark it as a work of its time and have some unpleasantly sexist
resonances when seen today.
Scarlett O’Hara
is introduced (in a scene that was actually the last one Vivien Leigh shot for
the film, since after five previous tries producer Selznick still hadn’t seen what he wanted from it) toying with a
couple of suitors called the Tarleton twins, who are so interchangeable the movie’s
credits have them backwards. It’s actually George Reeves (future TV Superman
whose mysterious death was the subject of Allen Coulter’s film Hollywoodland, featuring Ben Affleck in his finest performance) as
Stuart Tarleton and Fred Crane as his twin brother Brent. “Fiddle-de-dee,” she
says — and keeps saying throughout most of the first half of the movie, when
she isn’t putting off her dilemmas (including fending off most of the men who
want to marry her in her futile pursuit of Ashley Wilkes, who’s engaged to
marry his cousin Melanie for no better apparent reason than all the Wilkeses marry their cousins) by saying,
“Tomorrow is another day.”
One of Gone
with the Wind’s most interesting and least
spoken-of film antecedents is the 1931 MGM production A Free Soul. Though A Free Soul has nothing to do with slavery, the South and the
Civil War, it is a
two-men-one-woman romantic triangle with Clark Gable and Leslie Howard as the
two men. In A Free Soul Norma
Shearer stars as a young upper-class woman whose attorney father (Lionel
Barrymore) has just returned to practice following a stint in rehab for
alcoholism. (They didn’t call it “rehab” then — they called it “drying out” —
but the principle was the same.) Howard is her effete upper-class boyfriend and
Gable is the gangster she meets and falls for out of attraction to his sheer
roughness. In the end Howard shoots and kills Gable — obviously we’re supposed
to “get” that he’s “grown a pair,” as it were — and attorney Barrymore wins his
acquittal but drops dead in court of a heart attack just after finishing his
closing argument to the jury.
A Free Soul was one of the key films that helped make Clark
Gable a star, and set the template for a lot of his future vehicles: the macho stud who confronts the female lead, takes her down
several social pegs, and ultimately overpowers her into submission. Though at
least one of his frequent co-stars, Jean Harlow, was a powerful enough screen
presence to fight him back, he made most of his films opposite either Shearer or
Joan Crawford, who were easy prey for him. Rhett Butler fits the pattern of
Gable’s previous roles so well it’s not surprising 64 percent of the
respondents in Gallup’s poll waned Gable in the role.
He delivers the
goods, skewering the pretensions of his fellow Southerners in the early scene
in which he warns them that the North’s much greater industrial base and more
extensive railroads are advantages all the gallantry and honor in the world
won’t be able to overcome. When he approaches Scarlett, it’s in the same
Taming of the Shrew manner with which he
approached his other co-stars, especially in films like It Happened
One Night and this one in which the woman
has more money and a higher social status than he. And for all his skepticism
about the Southern cause, Rhett supports it first as a blockade runner (“for
money,” he insists), delivering supplies to the South and racking up huge
profits he stores in a bank in Liverpool, and then by volunteering for the
Confederate army just when it’s dawning on everyone else that the South’s cause
is lost.
It’s a measure
of Margaret Mitchell’s peculiar skill as a writer that she managed to convince
readers both in the 1930’s and since that Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler are
living one of the great fictional love affairs when the scenes between them are
highly combative and frequently quite nasty. Rhett opens by telling Scarlett
that “you need to be kissed, quite often, and by someone who knows how to do
it.” He shocks the crowd at a benefit dance for the Confederate cause by paying
money for a dance with Scarlett (which at least one crowd member denounces as a
“slave auction,” a bizarre bit of irony given that the whole point of Southern
secession was to preserve an economy that depended on the buying, holding and selling
of human beings as property!) when she’s supposed to be in mourning for her
first husband, Melanie’s brother Charles, whom she married just to spite
Melanie and who got measles and pneumonia at the front, dying a most unheroic
death.
Rhett keeps turning
up in Scarlett’s life, returning after the war when Scarlett is looking for anyone who can give her the $300 tax money she needs to
save Tara. She finds him in a Union prison camp, and he tells her he’s broke
because his fortune is tied up in England and if he tried to reclaim any of it,
his captors would notice and seize it all. After Frank Kennedy, Scarlett’s
second husband and a successful merchant she married because he could pay off the tax bill on Tara, conveniently
gets killed in the raid after that mysterious “political meeting,” Rhett
returns again and ultimately proposes marriage to her. She accepts and they
have a modicum of happiness, but they still do a lot of sniping at each other.
They have a
daughter, whom Rhett names “Bonnie Blue Butler” after the Confederate battle
anthem “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” but she dies in a fall from her pony in a riding
accident. Even before that, Scarlett has stopped having sex with Rhett because
having one child already spoiled her figure and made it virtually impossible
for Mammy to get her into the 18 ½-inch corset she wore before her pregnancy,
and she doesn’t want to risk her figure with another child. So one night Rhett literally sweeps her off her feet, carries her to their
bedroom and … thanks to the Production Code enforced on Hollywood between 1934
and 1966, the scene can’t get too graphic but it’s clear Rhett rapes her. When
she realizes that he’s impregnated her again, she throws herself down the great
staircase of Tara to induce an abortion and ensure that, to paraphrase her line
from the end of the film’s first half that “as God is my witness, I’ll never go
hungry again,” she’ll never get pregnant again.
Margaret
Mitchell managed in her novel to create two leading couples, the aristocratic
but ultimately weak Ashley and Melanie — who stay together for life and whose
son lives, or at least is still alive at the end — and Scarlett and Rhett, who
snipe at each other through most of the story. Scarlett and Rhett are the most
strong-willed characters in the tale, and they’re obviously at least
superficially “right” for each other, but they’re also so strong-willed that neither of them will make the
compromises needed to hold their relationship together. And after Rhett blows
off Scarlett and leaves her with his famous kiss-off line, “Frankly, my dear, I
don’t give a damn” — a word Selznick had to fight with the Production Code
Administration to get to use in the film at all — Scarlett is left alone
(except for all the faithful-to-a-fault Black ex-slaves who for some reason are
still working for her) with her precious plantation. Only her final thoughts
aren’t the goodbye-and-good-riddance-to-him-and-all-men ones a true feminist heroine would be uttering;
they’re a promise to herself to win Rhett back, no matter how much she has to
scheme to do it, because, “After all — tomorrow is another day!”
The Artistic Issues
So if Gone
with the Wind is racially problematic (to
say the least) and isn’t exactly the feminist tale that might make amends for
its racial stereotyping and whitewashed view of slavery, does it at least hold
up as a movie? Yes and no. Producer Selznick threw the entire armamentarium of
mature Hollywood at it; if The Birth of a Nation is really the birth of movies as an artistic medium,
Gone with the Wind is the full
flowering of the innovations of Griffith and others and the creation of the
well-oiled machine of classic Hollywood storytelling as they stood on the eve
of World War II.
Gone with the
Wind is very much a film of its moment.
While the novel had been published in 1936, at a time when the U.S. was working
its way out of the Great Depression and what was going on in those weirdly
named countries in Europe and Asia was a matter of profound disinterest to most
Americans, the film came out three years later, just as World War II was
beginning and many Americans feared we would get dragged into it as we had been
during World War I. As a film set on the home front during wartime, Gone
with the Wind avoids any depiction of
actual combat but brings home the horrors of war through the scenes of anxious
Southerners awaiting the arrival of the printed casualty lists, frantically
scanning them to see if their relatives are on them; and in the famous scene in
which Scarlett, a volunteer nurse in a wartime hospital, loses it completely
and wanders through an entire street full of wounded men. Selznick and
cinematographer Haller had to rent a construction crane to shoot that sequence
because no camera crane in Hollywood was long enough, or rose tall enough, to
film it.
The connections
between Gone with the Wind and World War
II continued after the film was released and after the U.S. entered World War
II in December 1941. Clark Gable enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps after his
wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash in January 1942 while
returning from a public-appearance tour selling war bonds. The corps originally
wanted to use him only for training missions and propaganda films, but Gable
insisted on flying in actual combat and, according to one member of his unit,
volunteered for the most dangerous missions because “I think he wants to be
with his wife.” At least Gable survived the war; Leslie Howard didn’t. He was
killed in 1943 on a commercial airliner flying from Lisbon, Portugal to Bristol,
England through an area the Germans considered a war zone. German gunners shot
down Howard’s plane, and some accounts claimed they did so because they
mistakenly thought British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was on it.
Certainly the
fact that Gone with the Wind was made
about a major war on the eve of another, even more major war gave it even more
emotional resonance than it might otherwise have had. But it’s also a powerful
story, vividly told, with four principal actors almost perfectly “right” for their
parts (five if you count Hattie McDaniel’s role as a principal, which you
should) and the virtues of Hollywood’s technological and aesthetic maturity.
The problem with
Gone with the Wind as a work of art is
it really doesn’t extend itself beyond the virtues of Hollywood’s technological and aesthetic maturity. The
use of the expensive and elaborate three-strip Technicolor process helped the
film’s appeal — especially after color productions became standard and Gone
with the Wind could therefore still be
shown in theatres after audiences expected all films to be in color — though the currently
available DVD Charles and I watched has had its color toned down to the more
burnished brown-and-green look common to a modern color film instead of the
vivid, sometimes overly garish hues for which three-strip Technicolor was
known. Indeed, the first feature film shot entirely in three-strip had been
made four years earlier — Becky Sharp, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and based on William Makepeace
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a book
that had strongly, shall we say, “influenced” Margaret Mitchell when she wrote Gone
with the Wind.
The biggest
problem with Gone with the Wind was
aptly described by F. Scott Fitzgerald during his short stint as a screenwriter
on it. He wrote David Selznick a memo saying, “I still think it’s dull and
false for one character to describe another.” The characters in Gone
with the Wind describe each other to each
other at great length — indeed, it’s largely through their descriptions of each
other to each other that Mitchell and the filmmakers let us know how they want us to feel about them. Gone with the Wind is also one of the most obviously “planted” films of
all time. “Planting” was a highly valued skill among 1930’s screenwriters; it
meant dropping a hint early on in the action that suggested, and gave an
audience forewarning of, a major plot development later on. Done well, it could
give a powerful sense of unity to a film’s story. Done poorly or too obviously,
it just seemed like arbitrary coincidence-mongering.
The most obvious
and outrageous example of “planting” in Gone with the Wind is the sequence in which the dipsomaniac Gerald
O’Hara, adjusting (or failing to adjust) to life after the North has won the
Civil War, its soldiers have laid waste to Tara and Scarlett and his other two
daughters have been reduced to picking cotton themselves to keep the plantation
going, takes his favorite horse out on the grounds of Tara, tries to make a
difficult jump over a fence and falls to his death. Almost two hours of running
time later Gerald’s granddaughter Bonnie Blue Butler takes out her pony for her
first attempt at a sidesaddle ride (since Scarlett has been told it isn’t
“lady-like” to let her daughter use a man’s saddle), attempts the same jump …
and just to make sure we get the point, we get a closeup of an increasingly
frantic Scarlett as she says, “Just like Paw … just like Paw!” before, you guessed it, Bonnie takes the same jump
her granddad had, with the same fatal result.
One other
element in Gone with the Wind that seems
really bothersome today is Max Steiner’s overwrought musical score. He usually
worked at Warner Bros., where studio head Jack Warner told his music people, “I
want the music to start when it says ‘Warner Bros. Present’ and not stop until
it says ‘The End.’” Even here, in a non-Warner film (though it now bears the
Warner Bros. logo since Ted Turner acquired MGM’s film library and then Warner
Bros. acquired Turner’s media company), Steiner all too faithfully followed
instructions.
His music not
only almost never stops, it comments directly on the action and mirrors the
visuals so closely it was sometimes derisively referred to as “Mickey-Mousing.”
(The term originated out of Walt Disney’s belief that audiences wouldn’t accept
a sound cartoon unless picture and sound were kept very closely in synch, and it became applied to
live-action movies that also had an especially tight coordination between the
visuals and the soundtrack.) Steiner’s music is so relentless that when we finally
get a scene in which he shuts up — Rhett’s actual marriage proposal to Scarlett
— the scene oddly seems more
powerful from the absence of Steiner’s music.
When Gone
with the Wind was new it got the reaction
David Selznick wanted: not only enormous success at the box office but critical
acclaim as the greatest movie that had ever been or would ever be made. More
modern critics have soured on it; though Dwight Macdonald applauded it on its
1961 reissue (deliberately timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the
Civil War) as “adult entertainment” because of the complexity of its
characters, in 1973 Richard Schickel slammed it for many of the same reasons
anti-racist writers attack it today: “Frankly, my dear, I didn’t (and still
don’t) give a damn about the South’s yokel notion that it once supported a
new age of chivalry and grace. … I never could join Miss Mitchell in mourning
the era gone with her wind, which seemed to me far from an ill wind.” He also
dismissed it as romantic kitsch
typical of Selznick’s overall output. (https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/73mar/schick.htm)
I still like Gone
with the Wind, though its soft-racist
depiction of American slavery is pretty off-putting and how I ache to see a
self-actualizing Black character in the film. (I once had the fantasy that
Selznick and his writers had had one of the slaves at Tara teach himself to
read and write, get whipped for that transgression, ultimately escape and then
return as a Reconstruction politician humiliating the O’Haras by forcing them
to take orders from a man they’d once owned. I even wished that Paul Robeson
could have played this part.) But I’m not even sure it deserved the Academy
Award for Best Picture in 1939; though it has its own set of problems, Frank
Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
is a much nervier film, audaciously blending Right- and Left-wing political
sensibilities (Capra was a Republican and his writer, Sidney Buchman, was a
Communist) and featuring a star, James Stewart, who stretched himself beyond
his usual range instead of neatly fitting into his comfortable groove the way
Clark Gable did in Gone with the Wind. — 6/15/20, 6/16/20, 6/17/20
•••••
My previous thoughts on Gone with the Wind:
Our roommate John P. had the TV tuned to TBS, which has been
running a salute to Academy Award-winning movies in preparation for tomorrow
night’s ceremony, so we watched the second half of Gone with the Wind (I’m not sure which version this is — there’s only
one commonly circulated version as far as content is concerned, but there’ve
been several reissues with different color values, and some critics lambasted
Ted Turner for allegedly turning down the color values on the most recent release, thereby making it look
more like a modern color film and
less like a film of its period), then all of The African Queen. The part of Gone with the Wind we saw was what John considers the weakest part of
the film anyway — the “soap-opera” part that begins with the death of
Scarlett’s second husband (at a mysterious “political meeting” that was
actually a Ku Klux Klan night-ride in the book, but David Selznick didn’t want
the NAACP on his back so he just made them an ordinary night-riding party that
kept their bedsheets on their beds back home) and goes through her marriage to
Rhett Butler, Melanie’s death, her last disillusionment with Ashley and Rhett’s
leaving her, with the famous curtain speech, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a
damn.” (Given the realities of the Production Code and how hard Selznick had to
fight to get that line in the film, it’s no surprise that he had a “protection”
scene shot in which Gable said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t care.”) The colors
seemed as rich and stylized as I’d remembered them — the inside of Tara in
particular had so much red carpeting it looked almost like a whorehouse
(Scarlett’s idea of making Rhett feel at home?) — with those famous sunsets
still glowing bright orange (brighter and more orange than the real thing) —
and Vivien Leigh’s performance is beautifully balanced, far better than Victor
Fleming’s sledgehammer direction or Gable’s playing Rhett Butler as Gable,
coasting through the role on sheer magnetism and screen “presence” instead of
actually doing something with it
the way Laurence Olivier or Ronald Colman might have done. — 3/24/96
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