Wings (Paramount, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I raided the DVD backlog for a movie to show Charles and I and found it in Wings, the 1927 Paramount mega-production about the air war in World War I that’s often referred to as the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was and it wasn’t: in that first year of the awards the Academy actually designated two best pictures, “Best Production” and “Most Artistic Quality of Production.” Wings won for Best Production and F. W. Murnau’s romantic masterpiece Sunrise won for Most Artistic Quality of Production. Though it was only that first year that the Academy gave out that dual award, it’s a practice I frankly wish they would return to: that way Black Panther, a cinematic masterpiece that transcended its comic-book superhero origins and offered Black characters of real agency and power in a story written and directed by African-Americans, could have won Best Production and Green Book, a good movie but one stuck in Hollywood’s usual patronizing attitude towards Black characters -- that they’re there only to bring about the moral redemption of the white characters -- could have been acknowledged with Most Artistic Quality of Production. (This would also improve the Academy’s TV ratings because it would mean the Best Production candidates would be big, commercial films large audiences have actually seen: the Academy was trying to address this conundrum when it briefly floated the idea of giving an award for “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film” before public ridicule led them to abandon it. The problem is that there are all too few films being made that combine commercial appeal and artistic quality the way Black Panther did.)

As a movie -- as the film generally acknowledged as the first Academy Award winner and the only silent film to win (unless you count The Artist, which might be considered a “neo-silent”), Wings remains an impressive movie, though if it had had to go head-to-head with Sunrise for a single Best Picture title I’d have been incensed if it had won (it would have gone on the list of Academy boners along with giving How Green Was My Valley best picture over Citizen Kane, the non-nomination of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dreamgirls, and -- I hate to keep harping on this -- Green Book over Black Panther), and its debt to King Vidor’s World War I movie The Big Parade (which dealt with the infantry rather than the air corps but still strongly, shall we say, influenced the whole conception and many of the specific scenes of Wings) is quite obvious. The most interesting fact about Wings -- aside from the obvious one that it was the blockbuster success of The Big Parade (the second most popular film of the silent era, after The Birth of a Nation) that got it green-lighted in the first place -- was that its director, William Wellman, and its writer, John Monk Saunders, had both participated in the World War I air war. Wellman had been a member of the Lafayette Escadrille, the squadron of U.S. pilots who volunteered to fly for France well before the Americans formally entered the war. Indeed, it had been his lifelong dream to make a film about the Lafayette Escadrille -- and he finally got the green light from Jack Warner in 1958, though it came with a condition -- he had to use Tab Hunter as the lead -- which turned him off big-time.

Wings is a 2 ½-hour spectacle that rather uneasily combines a pre-war prologue, a post-war epilogue, a lot of romantic intrigue and the aviation action scenes that are, predictably, the film’s highlight. (In 1930 John Monk Saunders would write a far better World War I aviation script, The Dawn Patrol, which would leave out women altogether and bring a refreshingly mordant sensibility and total lack of sentimentality to the basic situation.) The writing credits for Wings are typically convoluted for a silent film: Saunders gets credit for the story, Hope Loring and future producer Louis B,. Lighton for “screenplay” (which in the pre-sound days was usually called “continuity”: it took the original story, broke it down into individual scenes and specified what would be happening on screen in each scene), and Julian Johnson wrote the intertitles that gave the dialogue as well as the story background. (Intertitles as exposition lingered on well into the sound era; Gone with the Wind is full of them, and Johnson’s expository titles in Wings are just as fustian and overwrought as Ben Hecht’s for Gone with the Wind.) The central characters in Wings are small-town working-class boy Jack Powell (Charles “Buddy” Rogers), upper-class kid Dick Armstrong (Richard Arlen) and the women they both love. Mary Preston (Clara Bow, top-billed for some reason even though she has precious little to do and she’s not showcased effectively -- Bow’s career was ruined by all the B.S. made up about her by her personal assistant, Daisy DeVoe, after Bow caught her embezzling and fired her, which portrayed her as an insane nymphomaniac, and her modern reputation is handicapped by the loss of quite a few of her films; but when I saw her next-to-last movie, Call Her Savage, made in 1932 and one of the unsung masterpieces of the so-called “pre-Code” era, my regard for her as an actress shot up several notches) is Jack’s class-peer girlfriend, but Jack really has the hots for upper-class woman Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston, who replaced Mildred Davis as Harold Lloyd’s leading lady when Davis quit to become Mrs. Harold Lloyd for real), who in turn only loves her class-peer Dave.

There’s a business about a locket with her picture in it that Sylvia meant to give to Dave but gave to Jack by mistake -- fueling his unrequited crush on her -- as well as a miniature teddy bear Dave had as a baby, which his parents give to him to take into the war as a good-luck charm. Then the U.S. enters World War I and Jack and Dave both enlist in the Army Air Corps, and director Wellman shows their training in great detail, including the contraptions that are essentially cockpits suspended in gimbals to give the would-be pilots the sensation of flying before they actually get into the air. Along the way Jack and Dave end up rooming with Cadet White (a young but already recognizable Gary Cooper), who bites off a bit of a chocolate bar, offers some to Jack and Dave, then goes up for a flight to demonstrate figure-eight turns, but ends up crashing and being killed. The scene was obviously put in there to give Jack and Dave a heads-up about the dangers they’re going to face, but it also throws the rest of the movie out of balance because Cooper is so much stronger a screen presence than either of the leads and I spent much of the rest of the movie thinking how much better the film would have been with Cooper playing Buddy Rogers’ part. (Buddy Rogers became Mary Pickford’s third husband after her divorce from Douglas Fairbanks, and in the early 1930’s left acting to become a bandleader, famous for his trademark of lining up several brass instruments on a table and playing each one in turn. Gene Krupa got stuck as the drummer in Rogers’ band for a while until Benny Goodman hired him and launched him on his star career. Richard Arlen adapted successfully to sound films and had a long and successful career without achieving the exalted superstar heights of Gary Cooper’s.)

The big attractions of the film are the two action set-pieces, at the end of the first half in which Our Heroes successfully shoot down a German Gotha bomber that’s launching an air attack on the town where they’re billeted; and a final climax showing the so-called “Big Push” -- the major offensive that finally won the war for the Allies after four years of stalemate (and an earlier “Big Push” led by German general Erich Ludendorff that almost won the war for them). Jack and Dave are assigned to take out two huge German observation balloons that are reporting the positions of the Allied forces, and Dave gets shot down but survives, Trapped behind German lines, he escapes by stealing a German plane and attempting to fly it back to the Allied lines -- but Jack, seeing only the German insignia on the plane and not the identity of its pilot, shoots it down in what today would be called “friendly fire.” The action scenes in Wings are beautifully staged but suffer from too many titles -- one would have thought Wellman could have trusted the audience to figure out when a pilot’s machine gun had jammed, or when his oil line was shot out, rendering his engine inoperative, without Johnson’s titles explaining these things to us. (But then Wings was almost certainly the first dramatic film made about aerial combat, and these scenes were far less familiar to modern audiences than they are today, in which virtually all air-war movies follow the same basic plot devices and trajectories and only the hardware and technology have changed.)

In between there’s a scene at the Folies-Bergere in Paris where the pilots have gone for leave and are making whoopee with the French women (Charles noted that at least one of the couples glimpsed in this famously racy establishment were Lesbians) and Clara Bow, who’s in France as a volunteer with the Women’s Motor Corps, needs to pull Jack and Dave from their champagne-soaked revels (there’s an excessively campy device in which animated bubbles pour forth from the bottles, the characters’ lips and normally uncarbonated inanimate objects, and the soundtrack -- a modern re-recording of the original score George Zamencik assembled for the film to be played live as it was shown -- repeats ad nauseam the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” reused by Wellman to far better dramatic effect in his 1931 gangster film The Public Enemy), and Bow puts on one of the dresses of the Folies dancers but is caught in Jack’s bedroom out of uniform and fired from the Motor Corps, not to be seen again until the postwar epilogue in which she and Jack finally get together after his return and Dave’s death.

Wings is a technically accomplished film that shows off how good the late silents really were -- there are some spectacular moving-camera shots of the type that virtually disappeared from films in the early sound era, which immobilized the camera in giant soundproof booths; one critic during the early transition wondered why a silent camera could encompass mountains, valleys and rivers while a sound camera was helpless in the face of 12 chorus girls) -- though it’s simply not as good a movie as The Big Parade or Sunrise. At least the acting is relatively naturalistic, though Rogers is a bit too weak for his part and Bow is barely used at all despite her status on top of the cast list, and the action scenes are beautifully staged and have the ring of truth about them. Incidentally, Wings contains a scene in which a pilot is shot in mid-air and coughs up blood as he dies; two years later Howard Hughes used a similar scene in his World War I aviation epic Hell’s Angels (which he shot silent and then reshot as a talkie), and in 1930 Hughes threatened to sue director Howard Hawks for plagiarism for a scene in The Dawn Patrol in which a pilot coughs up blood as he’s shot in mid-air. Hawks replied, “You’re making movies for a hobby. I’m making them for a living. My scene stays in.” Hawks could have easily defended himself by accusing Hughes of plagiarizing the scene, since it appears in Wings, and Wings and The Dawn Patrol were both written by John Monk Saunders.

Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleading Scandal (Fox Television News, Orly Adelson Productions, TVM Productions, Lifetime, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I watched last night was an oldie-but-goodie Lifetime movie called Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal, made in 2008 and with better behind-the-camera talent than usually works for Lifetime: the director was Tom O’Laughlin (who made the last Friday the 13th film for theatrical release and followed it up with a TV series on the murderous character) and the writer was Teena Booth (who doesn’t seem to have been able to break through the TV ghetto but is a quite remarkable scribe whose other credits include Drew Peterson: Untouchable, another story about a psychopath who thinks his social and sexual connections will enable him to avoid responsibility for his actions forever). Fab Five was reportedly based on a real story and deals with a group of five cheerleaders at a Texas high school (either in Houston or one of its suburbs, though the only clue we get as to where in Texas we are is a long-shot that includes the Astrodome) manage through their utter amorality and their parents’ connections (one of them is the daughter of the school’s woman principal who threatens to leave town and move back to her dad’s place in L.A. even though dad already has his hands full with a new wife and their kids -- and another has a mom who’s really good friends with most of the school board) essentially to terrorize the entire school -- fellow students, faculty and staff -- into total and abject submission.

The film’s actual heroine is Emma Carr (Jenna Dewan), who’s just been brought in to the school to take over a departed teacher’s rural geography class (at first I wondered what “rural geography” meant and how it differed from any other sort of geography, but the more I thought it the more it made sense that in a large state like Texas, which is largely agrarian even though it has at least five major cities, “rural geography” might be a specialized discipline a high school would feel it needed to teach) and also her assignment coaching the school’s cheerleading squad. Once Emma starts calling the cheerleaders together for practice she realizes what she’s up against and the probable reason her predecessor left, the titular “Fab Five”: Brooke Tippit (a marvelous bad-girl performance by Ashley Benson), Jeri Blackburn (Jessica Heap), Lisa Toledo (Aimee Fortier), Tabitha Doering (Ashlynn Ross) and Ashley (Stephanie Honore). They make it clear to Emma from the get-go that they don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the cheerleaders -- or, for that matter, of normal, non-psychopathic human beings. Indeed, in their total lack of empathy, their unconcern with the welfare of anyone but themselves, and their unwillingness to submit to anyone else’s rules they reminded me so much of Donald Trump I rather grimly joked, “Which one of them is going to be the first woman President?”

Curiously, they don’t seem all that interested in sex except to the extent that they can use it as a weapon to get other things they want: one night, when they want to score beer and none of them happen to be carrying the fake I.D.’s they’ve made (or had made) for that purpose, they stage an en masse invasion of the car of a couple of boys at the school and flop around in their laps while grabbing their beers. The Fab Five abruptly become the Fab Four when Ashley is read out of the group for making a pass at Tim (Jason Davis), a boy at the school Jeri considered “hers” even though he insisted they’d broken up well before that. Jeri sees Tim and Ashley kissing in the school parking lot (though not doing anything more than that!) and she and the other three immediately declare war on her, ultimately cornering her at the end of a school corridor and beating the shit out of her. When coach Adam Reeve (Dameon Clarke), tall, sandy-haired and lanky in the usual tradition of nice males in a Lifetime movie, comes on the bruised and battered Ashley in the hallway and asks what happened to her, she gives the classic excuse of a woman in a relationship with a physically abusive partner: “I fell.” Coach Reeve sees through it instantly and says, “The next time you ‘fall’ like that, please call me.”

Emma and the coach ultimately turn to each other for moral support against the relentless assaults on their dignity and authority by the Fabs, but naturally the Fabs in general and Brooke in particular want to make it look like Emma and the coach are having an affair, even though both are married to other people, so they can paint Emma as an immoral adultress and get her fired. They overhear Emma telling Coach Reeve, “Isn’t it time we told your wife?” (it’s actually about a major vacation Coach Reeve is planning to take his wife on during summer break, but he wants to surprise her), and later they catch Emma and Coach Reeve giving each other an emotionally supportive hug. That’s all it is, but Brooke photographs it on her cell phone and offers it as evidence to her mom, school principal Lorene Tippit (Tatum O’Neal, in case you were wondering whatever happened to her -- it’s not every Lifetime movie that boasts a performance by an Academy Award winner!). Emma finds herself summoned to the principal’s office and confronted by Lorene, the hapless vice-principal Spretnak (Keith Flippen) and Jeri’s mother, Pamela Blackburn (a nice ice-lady performance by Rhoda Griffis).

Instead of getting the Fabs either expelled from the school or at the very least kicked off the cheerleading squad so the nice, normal-human girl Megan Harper (Hailey West) can take over and run the squad as a team instead of bunch of insulated prima donnas having their way with everybody, Emma finds herself fired and goes home to lick her wounds (metaphorically) with her husband (who not surprisingly is the same tall, lanky, sandy-haired “type” as the coach she was falsely accused of having an affair with) until she hears that a TV reporter is nosing around the school investigating the cheerleading squad -- whose latest antic, crashing an adult store and filming themselves drinking and playing with the sex toys, has “gone viral” on the Internet even though social media were still in their infancy in 2008. (Facebook was just one year old and Twitter didn’t even exist yet.) Against the advice of the Black woman teacher at the high school who tipped her off to the media inquiry, Emma spills all to a woman reporter and gets the school board to appoint a “special investigator.” Thinking he’s just going to be another official who’s going to whitewash the school and its Cheerleaders from Hell, Emma goes in with a hostile attitude. But the investigator actually does a fair job and in particular focuses her ire on Lorene Tippit, telling her, “You failed in your two most important duties, as a principal and a mother.”

Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal is that rarity, a Lifetime movie with no murders and no obvious mayhem -- the worst crimes we see are assault and underage drinking -- and yet it’s one of the most thrilling and involving things I’ve ever seen on this network. Teena Booth’s script rivals Christine Conradt’s best Lifetime work in creating genuinely multidimensional characters -- we’re powerfully kept in the dark as to just What Makes Brooke Run and the relationship between her and her mom Lorene is vividly drawn. At times they seem to have reversed the usual mother-daughter dynamic; Brooke seems to have her mom so cowed it seems as if the mother is desperately seeking approval and love from her daughter instead of the other way around. Fab Five is an unusually powerful Lifetime movie precisely because it’s so understated, and yet the actors, writer Booth and director McLoughlin rise to the occasion and paint a chilling portrait of just how powerful the “Fab Five” are at this school -- and, especially relevantly for our current political times, just how much of a leg up people who are totally self-centered and supremely uninterested in the welfare or rights or well-being of anyone else get to survive and even prosper in a world like ours that exalts greed as a virtue and damns altruism and empathy as vices!

Undertow (Universal-International, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, with Lifetime doing exclusively reruns of movies about killer cheerleaders (I’m not making this up, you know!), I dug out the Turner Classic Movies Dark Crimes, volume 2 boxed set and ran two quite interesting late films noir directed by William Castle. The full box included two films by Fritz Lang (with some rather testy commentaries by a rather prissy host to the effect that Lang considered himself the greatest director of all time -- though a case could certainly be made for that!) while Castle considered himself just a journeyman filmmaker who would take whatever budget his producer had to offer and make as good a movie as possible out of it. William Castle is best known for his 1950’s horror films for Allied Artists (formerly Monogram) and Columbia like The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler, for which he cooked up bizarre promotional devices: for The House on Haunted Hill he had a plastic skeleton come out from behind the screen and travel on a track mounted above the audience, and for The Tingler he wired certain seats in each theatre to deliver an electric shock to audience members in those chairs at the film’s climax. (John Waters recalls hearing about this gimmick, called “Percepto,” as a boy and going early to see The Tingler to make sure he got one of the wired seats.)

But in the 1940’s Castle had been a promising up-and-coming “B” director at Columbia and had made most of the Whistler crime-series movies, including one called Voice of the Whistler that ripped off Citizen Kane in its depiction of a lonely, troubled rich man keeping a trophy wife a virtual prisoner in an out-of-the-way location. Castle got to work as Orson Welles’ assistant on The Lady from Shanghai and obviously learned a lot from him. In 1949 he left Columbia and signed with Universal-International, where he made the two films of his included in this box, Undertow (1949) and Hollywood Story (1951). Undertow stars Scott Brady (Lawrence Tierney’s brother, whose acting style was considerably more understated even though off-screen both were holy terrors who drank a lot, got into bar fights and were arrested for real -- Brady was even incarcerated for bookmaking, ironic since this film casts him as a gambler!) as Tony Reagan (pronounced “REE-gun,” by the way -- Ronald Reagan was also usually called “REE-gun” during his Hollywood days but when he went into politics insisted that people use the “RAY-gun” pronunciation he had always preferred).

The film starts in Reno, where Reagan is managing a casino and gives a traveling schoolteacher from Chicago, Ann McKnight (Peggy Dow), a pair of fixed dice that allows her to win three throws at a craps table, then tells her to cash out so she can quit while she’s ahead and fly back to Chicago instead of taking a bus. Reagan runs into an old army buddy, Danny Morgan (John Russell), also from Chicago, and tells him that he too is returning to the Windy City but only to pick up his fiancee, Sally Lee (Dorothy Hart), and marry her. Then he plans to return to Reno, where he’s bought a resort on the outskirts of town and plans to run it and make sure any gaming it offers is legit. His only problem is that Sally is being raised by her uncle, Chicago syndicate master John Lee, and he had decreed that no one who’d been in the rackets -- as Tony had been before the war -- could marry her. He and Ann end up on the same plane back to Chicago and they chat each other up, but he’s already got a girlfriend and she’s got a teaching career she doesn’t want to abandon. The moment the plane lands Tony is accosted by two detectives from the Chicago Police Department, who tell him they’ve received a tip that he’s gone there to kill John Lee and if he knows what’s good for him he’ll hightail it back out of town. He asks the cops if they’re arresting him and if they have anything to arrest him for, and when they say no he leaves.

He has a reunion with Sally and an invitation to her home where he’s supposed to try to talk John Lee into letting him marry her -- only when he gets there he’s clubbed and left unconscious by two unseen assailants, and when he comes to he’s in his car with an injured left hand (one of his attackers shot him in the left hand to make it look like he’d been in a gun battle), he finds out John Lee is dead and realizes he’s been framed for the crime. He manages to trace Ann -- he goes to a drugstore for help with his hand, sees a phone book and tears out the page with her name, address and phone number on it -- and he stays at her place while he tries to prove his innocence. By this time Charles and I were starting to suspect that Sally was behind the plot to murder her uncle for his illicit fortune, especially since in just about every film noir with two women principals one was going to be the Good Girl and one was going to be the femme fatale, and Charles was ahead of me in guessing that writers Arthur T. Horman and Lee Loeb were going to have Tony’s Army buddy Danny Morgan be her co-conspirator and her lover. We get that nailed down when after Tony leaves them, Horman and Loeb give us a scene between them talking about the status of their plot, and Tony ultimately realizes it when he sees the engagement ring Danny had previously shown him on Sally’s finger. (They had both bought her rings, not realizing that they were planning to give them to the same woman -- a reversal of Bellini’s Norma, in which Norma and her friend and assistant Adalgisa commiserate about their difficulties with men when we know, though they don’t, that they’re the same man.)

Before that there’s a scene I suspect the writers were deliberately ripping off Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady, a famous noir Robert Siodmak had made at Universal five years before which also featured the gimmick of the innocent man who’s trying to clear himself of a murder charge asking for help from a supposed “friend” who’s the real killer. Fortunately, Tony has one police detective on his side, Charles Reckling (Bruce Bennett), whom he meets and turns over the gun that was used to shoot John Lee -- a captured Japanese pistol that’s so removed from most guns in Chicago the police can’t trace it to any particular owner -- and he’s convinced by the fact that the gun was totally clean, with no prints except Tony’s and Reckling’s on it, that Tony was indeed framed. During this scene Reckling is with an assistant detective from the department who’s played by the young Rock Hudson (though he’s billed in the opening credits as “Roc Hudson”!), at a time when Universal-International had just signed him and his agent, Henry Willson, was persuading Universal-International to put him in anything, no matter how small, so he’d get screen exposure and potentially be noticed, (He was, by German expat director Douglas Sirk, who cast Hudson in eight films, including his breakthrough role in the 1953 remake of Magnificent Obsession.)

It ends the way you’d pretty much expect it to, with Tony cleared, Danny murdered by John Lee's faithful Black retainer (an intriguing character and a far cry from the way most Blacks were still being depicted in 1949!), and Ann agreeing to give up her career and life in Chicago to come to Reno and help Tony run that little resort in the middle of nowhere, but overall Undertow is a fine, understated little noir that in a way benefits from Scott Brady’s very ordinariness. He’s not an especially talented or charismatic actor, but he’s good enough to be believable in the role and probably better than a more established star would have been. I tried to imagine this film with Humphrey Bogart in the lead and realized his star charisma and power would have pulled the plot entirely out of joint -- and besides, no movie audience in 1949 would have believed a Bogart character could be as totally naive as Tony has to be for the plot to work. (Bogart was also way too old for the part of a World War II veteran, though that hadn’t stopped Columbia from casting him as one in Dead Reckoning just two years before Universal-International made Undertow.)

Undertow also benefits from a surprising amount of location shooting in Chicago -- though some of it was second-unit work, enough of the location scenes feature Scott Brady it’s obvious he actually made the trip out there -- and though only a few of the scenes have the real noir atmospherics, it works as a morally ambiguous thriller and even Peggy Dow’s abrupt walkout on her life in Chicago at the end, which has been criticized as sexist and dramatically unbelievable, can be read as a statement of faith in her man comparable to Lauren Bacall’s willingness in the 1947 Dark Passage to leave the country in the company of the innocent but still officially “guilty” criminal she loves (played, natch, by her real-life squeeze Humphrey Bogart). Ironically, Peggy Dow walked out on her real-life career to get married and retire just two years after making this film!

Hollywood Story (Universal-International, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Hollywood Story was made in 1951 and was directed by William Castle from a script by Fred Kohner, son of expat German turned Hollywood agent Paul Kohner and father of Susan Kohner as well as another daughter, Kathy, whose stories of hanging out at Malibu Beach and watching boys surf inspired Fred to create the character of “Gidget” (short for “girl midget”) and launch a highly successful series of films for teen audiences. Kohner co-wrote the Hollywood Story script with Frederick Brady and the two dredged up one of Hollywood’s most infamous real-life scandals for the plot: the mysterious death of director William Desmond Taylor in his bungalow in 1922. This led to the collapse of the careers of actresses Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand, both of whom had been supposedly linked romantically with Taylor (though at least one version of the story says they were both “beards” and Taylor was really Gay and was using his Black chauffeur to pick up boys for him). The Taylor killing was never solved -- though in later years director King Vidor researched it and hoped to develop a comeback film based on it (he decided Mary Miles Minter’s overprotective mother had killed Taylor, though a later author disputed that and said Taylor had been killed by organized crime) -- and in this version it gets tweaked in some interesting ways.

Hollywood Story begins with a prologue depicting the murder and then cuts forward from 1929, when the murder occurred (Kohner and Brady moved it seven years forward so they could incorporate the change from silent to sound films into their plot), to 1950. Hotshot New York-based film producer Lawrence “Larry” O’Brien (Richard Conte, top-billed and anxious to change his image from gangster roles to good guys) has just been lured, along with his producing partner Sam Collier (Fred Clark), to make films in Hollywood. (The film is narrated by Jim Backus in his role as Mitch Davis, O’Brien’s agent, a gimmick I could have done without -- though Backus is quite fine in it and it’s nice to know he could do other things besides the voice of Mr. Magoo, the rich guy in Gilligan’s Island and James Dean’s emasculated father in Rebel Without a Cause.) O’Brien rents an old studio that hasn’t been used in 20 years (it was really Charlie Chaplin’s lot!) and stumbles on the studio bungalow where 21 years earlier the famous director Frederick Ferrara was killed while a player piano cranked out Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Song of India.” He’s fascinated by the scene, the story behind it, the photos of famous silent stars on its walls and the fact that the room was left so untouched the roll of “Song of India” was still on the player piano. So he decides to base his first Hollywood film on the Ferrara murder, which means he has to solve the cold case himself.

Among the properties he spots in Ferrara’s old bungalow is a portrait of the great silent star Amanda Rousseau -- and in one scene he turns from looking at the painting to seeing a woman who’s the spitting image of the woman in the portrait. The living woman turns out to be Amanda’s daughter Sally Rousseau (Julie Adams, who turns in a rich, remarkable performance that will surprise you if all you think of her as is the damsel in distress in the 1954 monster film Creature from the Black Lagoon). O’Brien investigates the case and at the same time hires Ferrara’s former writer, Vincent St. Clair (Henry Hull), to do the script for his movie even though his last credit was in 1929 and that had my B.S. detector going: I asked, “How do they know he can write a script with dialogue?” (Writers were far less important in the silent era than they became later, and most silents were written by three people or teams: one writer thought up the overall story, the next worked on the “continuity” -- the content of each individual scene and how they would link up -- and the third would write the intertitles that contained the dialogue.) As it turns out, the difference between silent and sound writing becomes an important issue in resolving this film’s plot.

O’Brien interviews the surviving suspects in the Ferrara murder case and also finds out that Ferrara was a descendant of one of the original Californios, the Spaniards who settled the state, received land grants from the Spanish crown and held their high social positions until California became part of independent Mexico in 1821 and then was conquered by the United States as part of the 1846-1848 Mexican War. He had a brother, Pete Ferrara, who was credited as a writer on most of Frederick’s films but was always jealous of Frederick’s success. Among the original suspects were Peter, actor Roland Paul (Paul Cavanaugh) -- a silent-era star in Ferrara’s films whose career was wiped out by the scandal of Ferrara’s death, though he’s still working in Hollywood and scraping together a living in bit roles -- and screenwriter St. Clair, who turns out to be Peter Ferrara. It seems that the Ferrara brothers had just made their first talkie before Frederick was killed, and it had been a wretched flop because of the poor quality of the dialogue (see, I told you that was going to be important!), whereupon Peter killed his brother out of jealousy of his success and assumed the name “St. Clair” because St. Clare was the patron saint of the Ferrara family. (O’Brien realizes this when he visits the famous San Juan Capistrano mission and sees a metal plate -- made by the Ferrara boys’ silversmith father -- of St. Clare on the outside wall of the mission.)

Among the surprise suspects is O’Brien’s partner Sam -- well, he is played by Fred Clark, after all (Clark is even seen in a flashback that shows him 20 years younger, though the only difference is he’s wearing an ill-fitting toupee) -- though at the end St. Clair is established as the real killer and hunted down in the studio (the chase takes them through the prop department, where we see a lot of bric-a-brac in the background: yet another indication of Orson Welles’ influence on William Castle!), the film gets made and is a huge success, and O’Brien and Sally Rousseau pair up. There are some intriguing directions Kohner and Brady could have taken his story, including having O’Brien cast Sally Rousseau to play her mother in the film and build her into a big star and making O’Brien more of a rougher and conflicted character -- as Charles noted, Hollywood Story had the visual “look” of a film noir but little of the moral ambiguity; the characters are pretty much either all good or all bad, and part of that may have been Richard Conte’s desire to play an unambiguous hero after years of being typecast as a crook (apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that he could carry over elements of his former anti-social typecasting into his mostly good-guy roles the way Humphrey Bogart did in his transition from gangsters to sympathetic leads).

It’s also obviously a film influenced not only by the William Desmond Taylor murder case but also by the huge success of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, made the year before and also a murder film set against the backdrop of both silent-era and contemporary Hollywood. We get to see two clips from silent films, one real (Mary Philbin’s famous “unmasking” of Lon Chaney, Sr. in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera) and one faked (Julie Adams and Paul Cavanaugh in ridiculously heavy makeup in a scene from one of Ferrara’s films starring Amanda Rousseau … so Adams got to play her own mother on screen, and in a featured interview on the DVD in which she still looks surprisingly good she talks about how much fun she had duplicating the stylized acting of silent films; ironically the action in the scene is reminiscent of the clip from Gloria Swanson’s 1928 film Queen Kelly used in Sunset Boulevard, and there’s a world of difference between Swanson’s restraint in the actual silent clip and Adams’ exaggerated gestures in the 1951 simulation), and we also get to see surviving actors from the silent days, including Francis X. Bushman (a frequent guest on early-1950’s TV show talking about Hollywood’s silent days) and Helen Gibson, and Charles noted that Castle gave them a lot more to do on screen than Billy Wilder had in the infamous “waxworks” scene showing them playing bridge in Sunset Boulevard.

Hollywood Story is a quite interesting movie, well made and with a convincing ending to a mystery that remains unsolved in reality -- though I must say that I was a bit put out by them making the writer the killer, just as I had been in a 1930’s “B” whose title escapes me at the moment in which the gimmick was that the reporter “sleuth” character figures out that the writer committed the murder because of the similarity of the real-life crime to his script!

The Doctor Takes a Wife (Columbia, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. I ran Charles and I an item from one of the two four-film sets I’d bought of Columbia Screwball Classics, so we had the unusual experience of watching a classic-era film from a commercial DVD rather than a home-recorded one or an archive.com download. The film was The Doctor Takes a Wife, made in 1940 and directed by Alexander Hall from a script by George Seaton and Ken Englund based on a story by Aleen Leslie. I hadn’t realized that in some ways The Doctor Takes a Wife was the classic-era version of the film Charles and I had watched the night before, Life as We Know It, though in this case instead of a baby that forces the two leads to live together and pretend to be married it’s a misunderstanding that turns into a publicity stunt. June Cameron (Loretta Young) is a feminist author who’s just published a best-selling book called Spinsters Aren’t Spinach about the wonderful, fulfilling and unencumbered lives women can have living alone. She’s stranded in Greenwich, Connecticut and has no way to get back to New York City for an emergency meeting with her publisher and boyfriend, John Pierce (Reginald Gardner, only mildly less prissy than usual), when she essentially commandeers the car of Dr. Timothy Sterling (Ray Milland), who has an M.D. but is stuck as an instructor at a college where he’s hoping to get a full professorship so he can afford to marry his girlfriend, Marilyn Thomas (Gail Patrick).

By chance (or scriptorial fiat) they stop in front of a quickie wedding chapel and the justice of the peace officiating there hires a boy to slap a “Just Married” sign on the car of the chapel’s latest (presumably) happy couple. Only of course the kid sticks the sign on Dr. Sterling’s car, and before they get to New York the grapevine spreads the word that the Great Apostle of Single Femaledom has tied the knot after all -- one woman recognizes Joan Cameron riding in a car with a “Just Married” sign and says, “Traitor!” Then John Pierce has an idea: since everyone, including the media, think June and Dr. Sterling are married -- which, among other things, has given the good doctor the promotion to full professorship he’s long wanted because the dean of his school (Paul McAllister) believes only married men have the stability for that position -- he’ll have them live together and pose as married so June can write a follow-up book on the joys of matrimony, whereupon after she finishes the book she can go to Reno for six weeks for an equally sham divorce. Only the inevitable (at least in a Hollywood movie) happens and the two hatebirds decide by the end of the film that they really love each other and get married for real -- they’re under the gun of a Morning Express reporter who’s found out they never were married and demands they produce a marriage license by midnight that night or he’ll expose them, but by the end of the film it’s chear they’re going to stay for real.

The sensibility of George Seaton, who in 1946 wrote and directed one of the most openly feminist films in classic Hollywood, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (in which Betty Grable plays a typist who builds a secretarial business and ends up with a man as her professional and personal partner instead of having to give up her career for him as most career women in classic Hollywood had to do -- especially in 1946, when the women who’d taken on men’s jobs during World War II were being told they had to give them up so the men could get their jobs back after the war and maintain their fragile hold on dignity and self-esteem), is all over the script here, and there are audacious scenes like the early one in which Dr. Sterling insists on being paid half the costs of their trip from Connecticut to New York and won’t leave June’s apartment until he feels sufficiently compensated. His idea of sufficient compensation is to grab a bottle of Scotch from June’s liquor cabinet and down about three-fourths of it, and while 1940 audiences probably read this as just another comic drunk scene, today it looks like Ray Milland warming up to play the decidedly non-comic drunk Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend, the film that broke him out of the pretty-boy ghetto and won him the Academy Award.

There are also some delightful performances by the supporting cast, including Edmund Gwenn as Dr. Sterling’s father; Frank Sully and Gordon Jones as a couple of college football players who give John Pierce a flying tackle when they think he’s hitting on their beloved professor’s wife (they love him because he gave them a passing grade they didn’t deserve and thereby preserved their eligibility); and a quartet of singing telegram deliverers, one of whom I think was Elisha Cook, Jr. (Cook was just another milquetoast comic-relief player -- though he’s superb in the standout role of the campus radical in the 1936 musical Pigskin Parade -- until John Huston gave him his career-transforming role as the gulsen Wilmer Cook in the 1941 Maltese Falcon.) At times I wondered whether The Doctor Takes a Wife might have been better with a stronger, more openly “feminist” woman in the female lead -- someone like Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck -- but on reflection I decided they might have been too overbearing and Young’s softer approach might have been better (just as the first time I sw Warners’ 1937 biopic of Florence Nightingale, The White Angel, I wished they’d got Hepburn instead of Kay Francis to play her -- but on a later viewing I decided Francis’s softer but equally implacable determination to make her feminist points probably worked better than Hepburn’s flaring anger would have).

Some of Charles’ and my most fascinating movie nights have been these rare opportunities to compare a classic and modern approach to a similar story premise, and this time they pretty much came about even; I’m glad that the Production Code is over and moviemakers have more freedom to depict sexual relationships honestly and to have their characters swear, but I also appreciate the imagination the Code enforced on filmmakers -- even though it had its limits: there’s a lot of sniggering about Ray Milland being in Loretta Young’s apartment without being married to her, and the writers even borrowed the Bringing Up Baby gimmick of having someone (in this case, John Pierce) hide Dr. Sterling’s pants so he can’t leave. The Doctor Takes a Wife is, like Life as We Know It, not a great movie but a fun one -- though one can’t imagine a modern-day remake without a lot of tweaking of the moral attitudes: today a woman writing a book about the joys of singlehood wouldn’t have to pretend that she wasn’t having a sex life, and the plot would probably be about how a misunderstanding led people to believe she had actually married her latest boy-toy!

Life as We Know It (Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I screened Charles a movie from the DVD backlog that turned out to be quite interesting even if rather predictable: Life as We Know It, directed by Greg Berlanti (who’s since become known primarily as a producer of superhero TV shows featuring the DC characters for the CW Network) from a script by Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinson. Released in 2010 and shot entirely in Georgia to take advantage of the Peachtree State’s famously generous subsidies to filmmakers -- though at least this time Atlanta, Georgia is playing itself instead of being passed off as somewhere else -- Life as We Know It begins with an inauspicious blind date between Holly Berenson (Katherine Heigl) and Eric Messer (Josh Duhamel).Eric -- who usually goes by his last name (people often call out to him, “Hey, Messer”) -- shows up for the date on a motorcycle and hasn’t made reservations at a restaurant for dinner. He’s also kept Holly waiting for an hour, and when he makes a crude and blatant pass at her she sends him away.

This disastrous date was set up by both people’s best friends, married couple Peter (Hayes McArthur) and Allison (Christina Hendricks) Novak, whom we next see at an elaborate one-year birthday party for the Novaks’ daughter Sophie (credited to three people -- Alexis, Brynn and Brooke Clagett -- were the shooting schedule and the legal limits on how long a baby could work so stringent that instead of the common casting trick of using twins, they had to use triplets?). Holly, who makes her living as the owner of a combination high-end bakery and deli she’s hoping to expand into a full-service restaurant (a plot line that seems hopelessly dated in the SARS-CoV-2 era!), has supplied a magnificent spread of cakes and pastries that seems more suited to a Marie Antoinette “do” at the Palace of Versailles than a birthday party for a one-year-old who can’t eat most of the stuff and would probably be too young to remember much of it anyway.

Then Peter and Allison both get killed in an auto accident, and under the terms of their will Holly and Eric are supposed to raise Sophie jointly and live in the Novaks’ home. They left enough of a trust to pay the mortgage on the place but not any of the other expenses, and of course the other expenses pile up and add fuel to the already combustible relationship between the two leads, who are supposed to raise a child together even though they can’t stand each other and, being single, are more interested in dating other people than establishing a modus vivendi with each other. In addition to the usual gags of a baby-raising movie -- the constant crying and demands for attention that keep the adults from getting any sleep; the feedings (or attempts to feed, since Sophie spits up so much of her food Holly rather grimly jokes, “She’s the only person in Atlanta who doesn’t like my cooking”), and the need for constant diaper changes and other untimely poops (at one point the two are bathing Sophie when her bowels let loose, and the only thing Holly has to catch baby’s latest shit in is Eric’s prized baseball cap which he’s had since high school), there are also the periodic and predictably ill-timed viusits from Janne Groff (Sarah Burns), a social worker assigned by the county to make sure Holly and Eric are parenting properly.

On one such occasion Janine shows up just as Holly and Eric have made marijuana-laced brownies and made love for the first time (well, it is a 21st-century romantic comedy, after al, and though Berlanti is reticent enough he shows a good deal less than most of the Lifetime directors do in their soft-core porn scenes, we still get the idea. Janine grabs for one of the spiked brownies and Holly knocks it out of her hand, saying it was a bad batch and she’s too proud of her skills as a baker to let a guest have one. Then the writers throw a curveball: Eric, who’s been working as a technical director at Atlanta Hawks basketball telecasts (and who would watch the games on TV when the team was on the road … until Sophie insisted on watching a kids’ show called The Wiggles instead, the kind of stupefyingly banal show I couldn’t stand even when I was a kid!), gets an offer to become a full TV sports director. Unfortunately, it’s in Phoenix (though all we see of Phoenix is a couple of second-unit backgrounds as Eric drives in front of a green screen), and Eric takes the job and leaves Holly to fend for Sophie alone. In the end, though, everything works out and he returns, taking his place in the family again after a bizarre scene in which Janine ends up on the side of good, helping Holly race to the airport to catch Eric before he takes his return flight to Phoenix … only Eric himself decided not to leave and is back at the house when Holly and Janine return.

I was a bit disappointed by the ending -- it’s a pet peeve of mine when a movie script makes a character choose between his lover and his dream job, and I’d have rather seen it end with Eric and Holly selling the house, Holly selling her bakery and using the proceeds to start a new one in Phoenix, and Eric keeping his unlikely girlfriend, his even more unlikely daughter and his dream job. But Life as We Know It is still a quite pleasant and entertaining movie (even though with my antiquarian bent I couldn’t help but think how much better the basic concept could have been done in the 1930’s or 1940’s with Barbara Stanwyck and Cary Grant! Indeed, Charles noted similarities between this and the 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut, in which Stanwyck and her leading man, Dennis Morgan, had to pose as a couple for a feature in the magazine Stanwyck worked for). It’s well directed, nicely if rather predictably written, and Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel are good in the leads even though one gets the impression that in 2010 they were the people producers called if they couldn’t get Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise. (Interestingly, Charles thought the other man in Holly’s life -- Josh Lucas as Sam, who cruised Holly at her shop early in the movie and later turned out to be Sophie’s pediatrician -- was sexier than Josh Duhamel, though I thought he looked too bland and boring, like the tall, lanky, sandy-haired actors who get cast as good husbands in Lifetime movies.)

I also liked the young Melissa McCarthy as DeeDee, hanger-on in the Novaks’ social circle, though I wondered why in this Georgia-set film she’s the only character who speaks with a Southern accent. (Maybe the tales I keep hearing from Democratic political commentators that enough Northerners are moving to the South they’re diluting the area’s traditional racial prejudices and making it more socially, as well as politically, liberal.) Life as We Know It is one of those pleasant little movies that doesn’t achieve greatness but doesn’t really aspire to it either -- it’s pleasant entertainment that exploits some of moviedom’s hoariest cliches but still puts enough fresh spins on them one is with the writers instead of leaping ahead of them and thinking, “Oh, I know where this is going to go.”

Night Moves (Warner Bros., 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. last night I screened Charles a quite interesting movie from my backlog of home-recorded DVD’s I’d been able to make until the start of 2016, when Cox Cable changed to an “all-digital” service that doesn’t allow you to make recordings (unless you pay them extra for a so-called “DVR” that’s cloud-based instead of using physical storage media): Night Moves, a 1975 neo-noir thriller starring Gene Hackman as L.A.-based private detective Harry Moseby, who gets hired by faded starlet Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) to find her missing 16-year-old daughter Delly -- short for “Delilah” because her dad was a producer who specialized in Biblical films -- played by a young Melanie Griffith in what must have been one of her earliest credits. (According to imdb.com, Night Moves was her third film and she was 18 at the time she made it, though the character is specified in Alan Sharp’s script as being 16.) The search takes Harry from L.A. (where when he’s not working for pay he’s surveilling his own wife Ellie, played by Susan Clark, to prove she’s having an affair) to New Mexico and ultimately to Florida. For some reason screenwriter Sharp never explains, Harry seems to drive a different car in each sequence, and it’s not like he has a vehicle in every port, either: he’ll sometimes drive two different cars in the same city on the same day. (Does he borrow them? Rent them? Does he not want to be “outed” as a private investigator because if he drove the same car all the time, like most people, someone would recognize the car and “out” him?)

The two big themes of Night Moves are movies and sex: Delly is shooting to follow her mom’s career path into films (as the real Melanie Griffith followed her mother, ‘Tippi’ Hedren, and Grifflth’s daughter Dakota Johnson has become the third generation of her family to be a movie star) -- at one point someone announces she’s just got her card in the Screen Extras Guild -- and she follows her creepy biker boyfriend Quentin (a young and almost unrecognizable James Woods) to New Mexico because he’s a mechanic and he’s needed to keep the period cars and planes (the film features a white biplane trailing white clouds of a toxic substance in a scene obviously “borrowed,” shall we say, from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest). Only Delly is a total slut who seems, as my late partner John Gabrish said of me, to be interested in anything with two legs and something between them: she ditches Quentin for the older but butcher stunt pilot flying the plane, and later when the plane crashes Quentin is suspected of sabotaging it. Moseby traces Delly to Florida, where her ex-stepfather Tom Iverson (John Crawford) is running a boat charter service with his girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren), whose combination of sexiness and spunk easily makes her the film’s most interesting character.

The two are shielding Delly from her mom, and she’s resisting going back to L.A. until Harry and Paula take Delly on a diving trip (Paula’s supposed to be an experienced diver but she lets Harry, who’s never dived at all, help her check out her SCUBA equipment) and Delly discovers a decayed but still recognizably human body under water. Then she agrees to let Harry take her back to L.A. and her mom, only she’s killed in L.A. and Harry, thinking that her murder and that dead body down in Florida are connected, goes back there, confronts Paula and realizes that the stepfather, the stunt pilot and a lot of other people were involved in a scheme to smuggle priceless pre-Colombian artworks out of Yucatan and sell them to private U.S. collectors. (Sharp “planted” this plot twist by having one of Harry’s L.A. friends be a collector of pre-Colombian Mexican art.) Needless to say, this film is full of references to classic noirs and the people who made them: when Harry finally catches his wife’s paramour, the guy asks him, “Are you going to beat me up, like Sam Spade?” Later, when Paula is seducing Harry, she tells him that the first guy who ever touched her breasts was named Billy Dannreuther, “and my nipples were hard for half an hour after that.” (“Billy Dannreuther” was the name of Humphrey Bogart’s character in the 1954 film Beat the Devil.) The ending is a typically nihilistic one for a mid-1970’s movie: the still-surviving characters end up on a yacht called “Point of View” (interesting that Sharp named it after a cinematic term) off the Florida coast in which all the principals shoot each other and all but Harry die -- though he’s seriously wounded and the last shot is of Harry desperately trying to control the yacht, which just continues to turn around in circles, and it’s unclear whether Harry is going to die or the Coast Guard or someone will rescue him in time.

Night Moves is a good movie on its own but it pales in the shadows of its predecessors -- not only the great noirs of the 1940’s but a film Gene Hackman had made the year before, The Conversation, which also cast him as an alienated private eye and also had a singularly dark ending but was a much deeper and richer film raising questions of privacy and the ubiquity of surveillance (Hackman’s character in The Conversation specializes in audio surveillance and the catastrophe comes from his mishearing a key inflection in a conversation he’s recorded) that ring even truer today than they did in 1974. The Conversation was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and was the only film he made between the first two Godfathers; it had a troubled production history and ran so far over schedule it became a running joke in Herb Caen’s San Francisco Chronicle column. But it turned out to be an excellent film and Night Moves, directed by Arthur Penn (who’d previously worked with Hackman in his star-making film, Bonnie and Clyde, in which he played Clyde Barrow’s older brother Buck), is a good and engaging film but nowhere near the level of The Conversation. It also suffers from the problem Dwight Macdonald noted in his review of George Stevens’ 1959 Jesus biopic The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which he wrote that Jesus and his disciples didn’t realize they were making history “any more than the builders of Chartres Cathedral knew they were making Gothic architecture, though the builders of our modern collegiate ‘Gothic’ did.” My problem with a lot of the neo-noirs is that the directors of the classic films noir of the 1940’s (John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Howard Hawks et al.) didn’t know they were making film noir but the makers of the neo-noirs did, Not only were the scripts often all too referential to the classics (as Sharp’s script here is in mentioning two characters played by Humphrey Bogart!) but the writers and directors seemed almost to be working from checklists as they ticked off the cliches of classic noir one by one as they appropriated them.

It also doesn’t help that while the makers of 1970’s neo-noir copied the themes and plot lines of classic noir, they did not attempt to duplicate the rich chiaroscuro visuals of classic noir. Part of the problem is they were forced to work in color (though director Allan Dwan and cinematographer John Alton had proven you can adapt the visual style of film noir to color in the 1956 film Slightly Scarlet, and I’d count Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo as films noir even though they’re in color), and they tended towards a washed-out palette at the opposite extreme from the rich visuals of classic noir. (The cinematographer was Bruce Surtees, whose father Robert Surtees had had a long career doing professionally competent but unspectacular work on mostly historical or romantic films.) It also doesn’t help that instead of a rich, sinister orchestral score, Michael Small’s music was mostly based on the pop- and funk-influenced jazz that was just becoming popular in 1975. Still, on its own merits Night Moves was an excellent film -- though Sharp’s script didn’t allow for the rapid alternations of comedy and action Arthur Penn was known for as a director, he nonetheless respects his story and gets great performances, especially from Hackman, Warren and Griffith -- and my nit-picks about it certainly shouldn’t discourage you from seeking it out and seeing it.

Beethoven: Fidelio (Akkord-Film, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I looked for a “different” DVD to watch last night and found it in an seven-disc boxed set of Walter Felsenstein’s productions at the Komische Oper in what was then East Berlin (he lived until 1975 but missed the comedown of the Berlin Wall by 14 years). The box featured seven opera productions, and though all the pieces were sung in German only one was originally written in German: Beethoven’s Fidelio, the one we watched last night. (The others in the box were Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, Offenbach’s Bluebeard and The Tales of Hoffmann, Verdi’s Otello -- hardly a “Komische Oper” in the literal sense of the term! -- and Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.) I forget what order the operas originally came in in the box but I decided to rack them in the order of composition, and we’ve been screening them in that sequence.

What surprised us about this Fidelio is that -- unlike the Mozart operas, which were straight-up telecasts of live performances -- it was an actual film, shot on realistic locations and with actors on screen while different people sang the roles on the soundtrack. Richard Holm, the Florestan, was only one of a few people in the cast who got both to act and sing his part, and the character of Leonore -- Florestan’s wife, who disguises herself as a man, calls herself “Fidelio” and takes a job as a guard at the prison where Florestan is being held as a political prisoner by the principal villain, Don Pizzaro -- is played by three people: Claude Nollier (a woman in reasonably credible but not totally convincing female-to-male drag) on screen, Grete Zimmer as her speaking double (Nollier probably needed one because she was French) and Magda Laszlo as her singing double. The film was made in 1956 and shot in black-and-white and, according to imdb.com, was actually an Austrian production. The credits listed the Vienna Symphony and Vienna State Opera Choir but Charles and I had assumed the soundtrack was recorded in Austria and the movie filmed in East Germany, but apparently this was an Austrian production all-around and that early in the Cold War (five years before the Berlin Wall was built) Felsenstein was allowed to work in the West.

This is particularly interesting because the plot of Fidelio is a tale attacking political repression of all kinds: the hero is not only being imprisoned, but Pizzaro has kept him locked up in a secret cell and is starving him. What’s more, when Pizzaro learns that Florestan’s friend, royal envoy Don Fernando (Erwin Gross, whose voice double, Alfred Poell, was one of only three cast members I’d previously heard of), is on his way to the town of Seville where Florestan is being held, Pizzaro (Hannes Schiel -- whom Charles thought looked like Barnabas Collins, the vampire on the 1970’s horror soap opera Dark Shadows -- voiced by Heinz Rehfuss) decides to kill Florestan outright and enlists the help of the basically decent jailer, Rocco (Georg Wieter, with Wolfgang Hebenstein as his speaking double -- did he sing it himself but need help with the spoken dialogue?). Rocco refuses to commit murder but agrees to dig the grave for the mystery prisoner Pizzaro is planning to kill. There’s also a romantic triangle that plays kinkier than it no doubt did in Beethoven’s time -- another jail guard, Jacquino (Fritz Berger), is in love with Rocco’s daughter Marzelline (Sonja Schoner), but she’s formed a crush on Fidelio -- while Fidelio him/herself doesn’t need the added romantic complication of a lovestruck girl interested in “him” when she’s focused on finding Florestan in the prison and rescuing him before Pizzaro can kill him.

Fidelio has been a problematic opera ever since Beethoven wrote it in 1805 in a radically different version from the one usually performed today; he wrote it as a Singspiel (literally “song-speech,” the German term for a musical drama with spoken dialogue between the sung numbers: the Austrians call it an operetta, the French an opera-comique and we call it a musical) and went through three versions (1805, 1806 and 1814) before finally arriving at a version that more or less satisfied him. Because Fidelio is the only opera Beethoven completed (though at one point or another he contemplating setting Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Coriolanus and Goethe’s Faust as operas) it’s hung on in the standard repertoire even though it has a lot of problems. It starts out as romantic comedy, suddenly turns into music drama with Pizarro’s big aria announcing what he’s going to do to Florestan and Leonore’s even bigger scena when she overhears him and screws up her courage to save her husband before Pizzaro can kill him. Then the final scene, after Don Fernando arrives, Florestan is freed and Pizzaro is arrested, is a great cantata of forgiveness and joy.

Musically, this performance was a good if not great presentation of Fidelio -- the cast was generally adequate and Rehfuss as Pizzaro better than that, though I’d rather hear a more butch Heldentenor-ish Florestan than Richard Holm. The weak link in this Fidelio musically is its conductor, Fritz Lehmann, who’s professionally competent but way too slow, bringing a poky listlessness to a score Arturo Toscanini in his 1944 recording (the one I learned Fidelio from) turned into a gigantic start-to-finish energy rush. (Toscanini also had truly dramatic voices in the leads: Rose Bampton and Jan Peerce.) What makes this movie interesting is the visual component: Felsenstein (who directed and also co-wrote the script with Hanns Eisler, usually a composer and collaborator with Bertolt Brecht) seemed to be modeling his film on the movies Mexican directors were making in the 1930’s and 1940’s about their country’s 1910-1917 revolution. Most of the scenes are shot with red filters, and in the great scene where Fidelio, behind Rocco’s back, orders the prisoners to be released in the exercise yard in hope she can spot Florestan among them, in this version they come out not into a dreary prison yard but into a park, where they sing the praises of freedom and how they long for it before Rocco catches on, he orders them back into their cells and they sing another choral lament (one of the pieces Beethoven added for the final 1814 version) over the loss of sunlight.

I get the impression Felsenstein was throwing so many natural outdoor images into the movie to pay tribute to Beethiven’s well-known love of nature, and also for symbolic reasons: lightning flashes criss-cross the sky as Pizzaro sings of his murderous intentions. At the end clouds drift over the scene as Felsenstein pulls back his camera for a crane shot showing the size of the crowd in the final scene of forgiveness. Fidelio is an opera that transcends its rather murky origins (it was part of a sub-genre of “rescue operas” popular in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, and indeed Beethoven and his first librettist, Joseph Sonnleithner, ripped off the plot from a French play that had already been set as an opera by at least two other composers, the sort of thing you could get away with in those pre-intellectual property days. Heard today -- and especially in a performance that crossed the Iron Curtain (and with a well-known leftist like Eisler as co-writer) -- Fidelio emerges as a powerful human drama as well as a political proclamation of the need for freedom and justice and the desire of certain people in any society to rule arbitrarily by fear, intimidation and repression. Elements of this story are being lived today in places as far-flung as Hong Kong and Washington, D.C.!

"Game of Thrones," season six, episodes nine and ten: "Battle of the Bastards," "The Winds of Winter" (Televison 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. Charles and I watched the final two episodes in season six of Game of Thrones -- our “Westeros odyssey” has now journeyed three-fourths of the way through the show’s entire run and things are beginning to settle down a little if only because so many of the lead characters are being killed off in one cataclysm or another that the remaining plot lines are getting easier to follow and the key suspense issue of who will end up on the Iron Throne ruling all “Westeros” (obviously based on the main British island) is getting closer to resolution -- much like the sort of murder mystery in which so many of the characters are killed it gets easier to figure out whodunit just by process of elimination. As with previous Game of Thrones episodes I’ll quote the synopses on imdb.com and then offer my glosses:

Battle of the Bastards: Meereen is under siege and the fleet of the masters is attacking the city. Daenerys wants to destroy their cities but Tyrion convinces her to not incur in the same mistake of her father in King's Landing. They schedule a meeting with the masters to discuss the terms of surrender. However the masters misunderstand and believe Daenerys want to surrender. She rides Drogon and together with the two other dragons, they burn part of the fleet. Meanwhile Daario and the Dothraki attack the Sons of the Harpy. Then Yara and Theon team up with Daenerys to accept the independence of the Iron Isles and to overthrow Euron. In Winterfell, Jon Snow, Sansa, Davos and Tormund meet with Ramsay, and Jon Snow proposes a dispute between them instead of sacrificing lives in a battle. Ramsay does not accept and they schedule the battle in the morning. Jon Snow plots a scheme with Davos and Tormund and Sansa warns that Ramsay plays dirty. When both armies are ready to battle, Ramsay brings a surprise that ... Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The Winds of Winter: Cersei and Loras stand trial for their crimes, while Jaime celebrates victory with Walder Frey at The Twins. Davos confronts Jon about Melisandre's actions, and Littlefinger reveals his intentions to Sansa. Meanwhile, Bran continues his quest for knowledge in the far North as "winter" finally arrives. “Battle of the Bastards” emerged as one of the most effective Game of Thrones episodes because it basically had only two storylines: Daenerys Targeryan’s (Emilia Clarke) attempt to keep the city-state of Meereen from being reconquered by the slaveholders who had ruled it before and were anxious to regain power once they got rid of these pesky abolitionists (much like the American Southern white leadership’s successful campaign to restore white supremacy in the decades after Reconstruction), and the battle over Winterfell between Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) and the invaders led by Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and his half-sister Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner). Outnumbered two to one, the Stark forces stake a position outside Winterfell and Sansa warns Jon not to be lured by Bolton’s attempts to provoke an attack. Only Bolton, who since the death of former king Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) has been the most openly evil character in the cycle, sends Rickon Stark (Art Parkinson) -- who I wasn’t sure whether he was Jon’s and Sansa’s brother or their nephew -- on a doomed run to the Stark lines with Bolton’s massed archers shooting at his back until they finally killed him. This stirred Jon to launch an immediate attack which went wretchedly for him in a scene that recalled the real-life Battle of Agincourt -- only with the difference that the side that outnumbered the other was also the side that picked the smarter tactics. At Agincourt in 1415 the French sent out their cavalry first (there’s an hilarious scene in Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V showing that the French horsemen wore such heavy armor they literally had to be raised onto their horses by pulleys instead of being able to mount them normally) while the British massed their archers in the front line and mowed down the French cavalry (who were also disadvantaged by the fact that it had rained the night before the battle and the horses literally got stuck in the mud).

This time it’s the bigger Bolton forces who put their archers in front and rain death on the Stark army in a scene that looks like an army with flintlocks charging into the face of an enemy with machine guns. The Stark forces are predictably overwhelmed and to administer the coup de grace Bolton orders his men to form a circle around Stark’s beleaguered survivors with spears and shields so they can murder them en masse when the Seventh Cavalry almost literally rides to the rescue -- in this case they’re the Blackfish army, whose castle is led by a bratty 10-year-old and whom Snow previously sought out for aid, thought they had rebuffed him, and went into battle without them anyway. As for Daenerys, she’s given an ultimatum by the slavers’ commander to leave Meereen and allow her “Unsullied” troops to be sold back into slavery, as well as her woman companion. Her version of the Seventh Cavalry is her three pet dragons, whom after being talked about in previous episodes that “teased” us with occasional glimpses of them and their power, we now get to see all of them in the same frame, incinerating enough of her former enemies and scaring the rest into giving up. This gives Daenerys not only control of Meereen but a fleet of ships, which she can use to get off the island she’s been stuck on (which, though east rather than west of Westeros, is obviously supposed to be Ireland) and stage an amphibious invasion of Westeros -- though she upsets her boy-toy by leaving him behind to run Meereen, at least in part because she plans to regain the throne of Westeros essentially by selling her body to the highest bidder and making the most politically and militarily advantageous marriage she can.

Episode ten, “The Winds of Winter,” finally dispatches the series’ most obnoxious character, the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), in a scene based on the real-life Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which diehard Roman Catholics planned to blow up both King James I and the British Parliament by exploding a large store of gunpowder under their building to stop the persecution of Roman Catholics by the British government. The plot is led by Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and annihilates the High Sparrow and most of the cult that’s assembled to try Loras Tyrell (Finn Jones) and his sister Margaery (Natalie Dormer), Loras for being Gay (for some reason all these creepy religious cults seem to pick on us!) and Margaery for having lied under oath to protect him. Loras pleads guilty and gets a scar carved into his forehead -- a permanent version of the scarlet letter -- and Margaery is about to be tried when the plot works, the High Sparrow’s keep is blown up and this horrible “holy” man meets the ending he deserves. (I only wish it were as easy to get rid of all the so-called “evangelical Christians” who clog up our politics and establish a similar dictatorship of “virtue” in which the government and the church tell people what they can and cannot do with their bodies!! As I told Charles last night, I have a particular loathing for the High Sparrow because of my visceral and enduring hatred for his real-life counterparts in our own time.) Alas, Cersei’s pilot backfires when her son Tommen (Dean-Charloes Chapman), who had been recruited to the cult, commits suicide after its destruction.

There’s also the unwelcome return of Peter “Littlefinger” Baylish (Aidan Gillen), who in his combination of unscrupulous opportunism, hypocrisy and unemotional coldness reminds me of Mitch McConnell and who’s still marketing his dubious services as an intriguer to various factions in the coming wars. And we get a glimpse of Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright), the disabled kid who’s being trundled around by a woman after having been advised by a talking tree with a human face who may or may not be one of this universe’s old gods (Max von Sydow, who ended his international career much the way he began it -- as a medieval knight literally playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal) -- and also assassin Arya Stark (Maisie Williams), who knocks off yet another creepy Old Fighter in one of the last scenes: she’s left the No-Name cult but is still putting her training there to use. I’ve written before about Game of Thrones as a reflection of the Zeitgeist of the Trump era (even though all but the last two seasons were filmed while Barack Obama was still President), with its depiction of politics as a ruthless no-holds-barred struggle between people who (with only a few exceptions) don’t even pretend to any higher social goals or to be in it for anything other than the power and the material rewards theirefrom -- money, the luxuries it buys and the sex it also buys. (Anya’s victim at the end is an old reprobate who buys himself prostitutes and then doesn’t pay them, sort of like Donald Trump with his lawyers.) I’m fond of joking after Charles and I have had MS-NBC on for a while, “Now let’s watch something that will reaffirm our belief in the kindness, decency and goodness of humanity … like Game of Thrones,” but I can’t help but think that the popularity of Game of Thrones and the rise of Donald Trump to near-absolute political power are two sides of the same coin: a deeply rooted cynicism in the power of people to be virtuous and at the same time the hope for an all-powerful father figure who will run everything on our behalf and Make Westeros (or America) Great Again.

77th Annual Emmy Awards (National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, ABC-TV, aired September 20, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the Emmy Awards telecast on ABC-TV, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel (who, like just about everyone else in the country, I keep getting confused with Jimmy Fallon -- memo to Messrs. Kimmel and Fallon: can’t one of you call yourself “James”?) -- and if the recent American Country Music Awards had shown a good example of how you can do a viable awards show in the middle of a pandemic, the Emmys were a good example of how not to. The one interesting thing they did is patch in guest presenters who aren’t part of the industry but represent “essential workers” during the pandemic, including firefighters and grocery clerks, to open the envelopes and present the awards long-distance. There was a cute gimmick by which each of the five nominees for Best Late-Night Host got a black box, one of which would contain an Emmy while the other four had … well, we only got to see one and it had some confetti and a couple of Blu-Ray discs. The outcome of this category was disappointing in that once again our fave, Stephen Colbert, lost to John Oliver (whose show we couldn’t watch even if we wanted to because it’s on HBO -- the only time I’ve seen Oliver was on a YouTube clip ridiculing the continuing obsession of Southern white supremacists with honoring and romanticizing the Confederacy when a) their side lost and b), contrary to the assertion of neo-Confederates that the Civil War was about “states’ rights” or anything other than slavery, he quoted the secession ordinances themselves as well as the recorded statements of Confederate leaders that it was about maintaining slavery, and nothing else. But I’ve never seen Oliver’s actual show -- and I haven’t seen most of the award winners, either, for the same reason: they’re all on premium or streaming channels I’d have to pay a lot more money than I’m willing to spend on TV to get.

The big winner in the comedy department was a show called Schitt’s Creek -- and Kimmel inevitably joked that every time he mentioned the show he had to post its logo as a chyron on the bottom of the screen to make sure people knew he was saying the name of the show, spelled with a “c” and two “t”’s, just to specify that he wasn’t using the common vulgarism for excrement that has two fewer letters but is pronounced the same way. The synopsis for Schitt’s Creek on imdb.com reads, “When rich video-store magnate Johnny Rose and his family suddenly find themselves broke, they are forced to leave their pampered lives to regroup in Schitt's Creek.” It was created by Daniel Levy as a vehicle for his dad, Eugene Levy, who plays the lead role in the series (and Daniel is in it himself as his real-life dad’s son), though actress Catherine O’Hara plays Eugene’s wife. The show apparently has featured at least one Gay plotline -- there were some references to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (back in the early days of radio the Canadians wisely followed the public-driven model of their former colonial masters, Great Britain, instead of the lassiez-faire private-ownership model of the U.S.), which co-produced with an American cable channel called Pop (supposedly a basic-cable channel but one I’ve never heard of and certainly can’t get), and the relative freedom Daniel Levy and his writers had to explore topics that get seen gingerly, if at all, on American TV. (Though with Will & Grace having had two incarnations on American TV networks and a surprising number of other shows, including Modern Family, regularly featuring Queer characters this is hardly as pioneering as Levy fils made it sound.)

The big winner in the drama department was Succession, a show dealing with the sorts of family battles for control of a big media enterprises that have beset the Murdochs at Fox and the Redstones at Viacom. (The In Memoriam section of the show featured Sumner Redstone as one of this year’s deceased. It was about bloody time.) There were a lot of stupid jokes about the pandemic -- most notably the bizarre outfits in which the couriers who delivered the awards to the off-site winners, which looked like someone tried to cross-breed a haz-mat uniform and a spacesuit -- as well as one genuinely funny skit in which a group of industry people hold a New Year’s party for 2021 because they can’t wait for 2020 to be over already. There’s always a certain degree of industry self-celebration in these awards shows, and while the political references were kept veiled (neither the names “Trump” nor “Biden” were mentioned once), it was pretty clear that the members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences were members of the anti-Trump party (“party” used here not in its strictest political sense but in the more amorphous overall sense of describing America’s polarized camps, which differ not only in their ideologies but their conceptions of human nature and morality). A lot of the speakers used the word “empathy” to describe a quality they find lacking in the mass psychology, culture and politics and wish would come back -- which certainly ties in with the appeal the Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular are making to try to get voters to defeat Donald Trump -- who not only lacks empathy but is downright proud of that lack. (Trump’s ghostwriter Tony Schwartz once described his attitude as “stomp, stomp, stomp all the time,” and both Trump and a lot of other Americans mistake that for toughness and strength.)

I’m a bit surprised that the Los Angeles Times this morning described this year’s Emmys as a good response to the pandemic and the limitations it’s imposed on entertainment -- especially real-time entertainment (blessedly the show was telecast in real time on the West Coast, too, so at least on this occasion the East Coasters who run the American media world did not make us West Coasters suck hind tit with a delayed rebroadcast!) -- when I found it horribly lame in precisely that department, and I turned it off early to watch last night’s LIfetime “Premiere” movie.

Her Deadly Sugar Daddy (Cartel Pictures, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie -- which may be the last one for a while, given that the next few weeks they’re re-running older movies about murderous cheerleaders and then they’re starting their Christmas-movie reruns in October (which to me makes their channel virtually unwatchable until their sleazy thrillers start up again in January) -- was something called Her Deadly Sugar Daddy, though imdb.com lists it simply as Deadly Sugar Daddy. It had strong similarities to the previous night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie, The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate, which only showed off how much weaker Her Deadly Sugar Daddy was in emotion, dramatic complexity and filmmaking skill. The director is Brooke Nevin and the writer is Brooke Purdy -- both of them are women, though I had to check their imdb.com pages for that -- but any thought I might have that this might be a more sensitively realized project because of the gender of its creators were pretty quickly dashed. The put-upon heroine who’s going to be stuck with the Deadly Sugar Daddy is Bridget Caprice (Lorynn York), daughter of the late and legendary novelist Lawrence Caprice (he left Bridget’s mom when Bridget was 12 and died a mysterious death -- possibly a suicide -- when Bridget was 16), who moves from Phoenix, Arizona with her friend Lindsey (Aubrey Reynolds) in hopes of making it big as a writer, or at least a paid blogger (this is the 21st century, after all) in Los Angeles. This means that Bridget has abandoned her nerdy boyfriend Zack (Kenneth Miller, who goes through this whole movie clean-shaven and thus looks throughout like the dork he looked like in the end of The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate after he lost the beard he wore through most of that movie -- memo to Kenneth Miller: the beard makes you look a lot sexier!) and also that she’s desperate for a job, especially since the blogging company she interviews for tells her that she doesn’t have an interesting enough life to attract their readers.

Needless to say, the Two Brookes are going to rectify that situation within an act or two: they have Lindsey enroll Bridget on an online dating site without her knowledge, and the first guy she goes out with from that site is a creep named Gerry Garrison (he’s not listed on imdb.com). He and Bridget go to a restaurant, where he puts the moves on her that lead her to walk out of the restaurant because she’s not going to have sex with a guy on their first date -- only he accosts her again outside the restaurant and also hits on her. Fortunately, or at least so it seems at the time, she’s rescued by a white knight, an obviously well-to-do and older but still sexy man named Anthony Glonz (Brent Bailey, top-billed). Before she gets into his car she asks, “You’re not some sort of psycho, are you?” -- to which of course I joked, “I’m a handsome guy in a Lifetime movie! Of course I’m a psycho!” Anthony slips her his business card and asks her to stop by his office to interview for a job as his “executive assistant,” and since he’s offering her $10,000 per month she decides to take the positon thinking it will mostly involve office work and leave her enough time to write. In fact Anthony runs a company that arranges for companies to take over other companies, and in that capacity he’s amassed a formidable lineup of people who “owe him,” including both the police chief and the district attorney of Los Angeles. Bridget finds out that her real job is to go to dinner with Anthony and his clients, all of whom seem to be older men who want to paw her and think they’re going to get to fuck her as part of whatever deal on which Anthony was working with them. Though Bridget somehow manages to make it through the movie without apparently having actually to go through the sex act (albeit the actor playing the L.A. County D.A. is a quite sexy African-American and the Brookes drop a hint that she might have done it with him) either with Anthony’s clients or Anthony himself, she finds herself ih much the same moral dilemma as the heroines of such 1930’s “pre-Code” Hollywood sex tales as The Easiest Way (1931) and She Had to Say Yes (1932). Like them she has to deal with the disapproval (to put it mildly) of the boyfriend from back home -- who moves to L.A. at least temporarily to try to bring her back -- and there’s a scene straight out of The Easiest Way in which Bridget’s mother Jolene (Elise Robertson) comes to L.A. to see her daughter and makes clear her disgust at the way Bridget is living and surrounding herself with at least a few of the finer things in life.

Needless to say, Anthony is a psycho who killed his immediately previous “executive assistant" Michaela and threatens to do the same to Bridget if she ever tries to leave him. He’s also got her place bugged and has sent his own security person, Damon Reclough (Rick Otto), to stalk Bridget’s and Lindsey’s cottage and try to break in so Bridget will be scared out of her own place and agree to stay at Anthony’s. As the film progresses Anthony’s character becomes more and more like Donald Trump’s: obsessed with “loyalty,” constantly reminding Bridget of the nondisclosure agreement she signed to take the job, demanding not only that she take down the blog she started about him (though she hasn’t used any real names, one wonders how his security people could have missed finding it out online), taking the surveillance footage he’s had shot of her with him and his “clients” on their dinner dates (a precaution he’s adopted to give him leverage for potential blackmail if his “clients” try to double-cross him or welch on their deals, but which he’s also used to construct a video that makes look like Bridget really was whoring herself to his “clients” at his command) and even making her smash the cell phone on which she’s taken pictures of potentially compromising documents, including Michaela’s I.D. (She does so with an eagle-shaped statuette that couldn’t help but remind me of the Maltese falcon.) Then he presents her with a new cell phone in an elaborate gold-colored gift box and says, “It was time for you to upgrade anyway.” Eventually Anthony confronts Zack and threatens to kill him if he keeps hanging around Bridget, but Lindsey and Bridget’s mom team up with Zack to get Bridget out of Anthony’s home.

Anthony tells Bridget she has a choice -- either stay with him and be second-in-command of his financial empire as long as she’s suitably “loyal,” or he’ll kill her and use his primo connections with law enforcement to escape any accountability or punishment -- but in the end Anthony is actually arrested for Michaela’s murder and Our Heroine ends up with her twerpy little boyfriend and the dream blogging job she came to L.A. in hopes of getting. Both Her Deadly Sugar Daddy and The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate deal with an innocent young woman taking a job with mysterious rich people (two rich people in Celebrity Surrogate) and finding that her life is literally not her own anymore as they subject her to horrible levels of discipline and control for their own ends -- but somehow the writing in Celebrity Surrogate is a lot stronger and both the heroine and her tormentors come off as far more complex and comprehensible characters than the ones in Her Deadly Sugar Daddy. We never learn much about Anthony Glonz -- either how he made his money or what drove him to his obsessions -- though he’s enough like Donald Trump I mentally gave him Trump’s real-life story (spoiled-brat son of a rich man who likes to portray himself as self-made when he really wasn’t) and thought of a sequel in which he escapes punishment for his crimes and ultimately gets to be President. About the only worthwhile aspect of this movie is Brent Bailey’s performance as Anthony: full of little glare-ice twists in his eyes and subtle changes in his intonations to let us know when he’s being Prince Charming and when he’s being Satan. Both the actor and the character deserved a better showcase than Her Deadly Sugar Daddy!

The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate (Indy Entertainment, Quint Pictures, Daro Film Distribution, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched what looks like it’s going to be one of the last Lifetime “Premiere” movies for a while because of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate. Tonight they have another “Premiere” scheduled, Her Deadly Sugar Daddy (listed on imdb.com simply as Deadly Sugar Daddy), but after that they’re going to show several weeks of reruns of their “Deadly Cheerleader” movies (“cheerleader” being one of those buzz words, like “sorority” or “escort,” the people running Lifetime use in their titles to lure straight men to watch their channel by promising them glimpses of hot young nubile female flesh in scanty clothing) and in October they’re launching a cycle of holiday-themed movies under the rubric “It’s a Wonderful Lifetime.” (That slow rumble you hear is Frank Capra turning over in his grave.) I’d like to watch the one being promoed by a shot of two nice-looking young men kissing each other on the lips, but for the most part Lifetime’s holiday movies are appallingly treacly and I just wait them out until they go back to neo-noir thrillers in January. The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate was originally titled just The Surrogate, until no doubt somebody at Lifetime realized they’d already used that title back in 2013 for the film that introduced the Whittendale University “universe.” So Lifetime stuck a new title on it that contained three buzz words for audience appeal -- “secret,” “celebrity” and “surrogate,” the last appealing to the kinky thrill stories about women carrying other women’s babies still seems to have for viewers turned on by this disgusting rent-a-womb practice.

In this story, directed by Mark Gantt and written by Courtney Henggeler (whose last name sounds like a Game of Thrones character but who supplies a surprisingly Conradtian level of depth and complexity that puts some meat on the usual bones of typical Lifetime characters), the rent-a-womb belongs to Olivia Bolton (Carrie Wampler, who’s blonde on her imdb.com head shot but is dark-haired in the actual film), who at the start has just about every life-unhinging plot compilation Henggeler can throw at her: her parents died just before the film begins, we first see her in bed with her boyfriend when she gets a series of frantic phone calls from the owner of the coffeehouse where she works -- she throws on some clothes and dashes there but even before she gets there her boss calls her and tells her she’s fired -- her roommate kicks her out for not paying rent for six months, and when she returns to her boyfriend’s place he’s already got another woman with him. “I have a drawer here!” Olivia protests -- “So do I!” says the other woman -- and so Olivia posts a message to her social media saying that she’s desperate for a job, any job, preferably one that will get her out of New York City. She gets an offer from a mysterious woman named Cassidy (Jordyn Aurora Aquino) who’s the personal assistant to fading movie star Ava Von Richter (Brianne Davis) and her husband, Hayden Von Richter (Carl Beukes). We get the impression that Hayden was her manager or producer and launched her career -- and we’re told outright that her last three films have bombed (we see a billboard for her latest one, Love Love Bang Bang, and it’s labeled “For Your Consideration” -- as if its producer actually thought a movie like that would be in line for Academy Awards!) and she’s recovering from a broken ankle she suffered while doing Dancing with the Stars.

Ava desperately wants a child of her own but she can’t carry a pregnancy to term herself, and rather than do the Joan Crawford solution of adoption (apparently a lot of female stars in the 1920;s, 1930’s and 1940’s adopted when they decided they wanted kids, largely to avoid the interruption of their careers a pregnancy would entail, and in her autobiography Ingrid Bergman said that when she arrived in Hollywood in 1939 with her daughter, Pia Lindsrom, the actresses she met were astonished that Pia was actually her and her husband’s biological daughter) she’s decided to look for someone totally rootless and without any family members or significant others to carry her child to term. The deal is that Olivia will receive $150,000 for her services as well as room and board throughout the pregnancy, only the deal starts to unravel when the Von Richters show all the typical indicia of spoiled Hollywood celebrities: they drink, they do drugs, they have nasty arguments that sometimes result in physical violence, and of course they also hit on the help sexually. Indeed, when Hayden Von Richter makes a pass at Olivia I thought the schtick was that Ava was totally infertile and therefore if Olivia was to get pregnant Hayden would have to do it the old-fashioned way -- you know, the fun way. (As things turned out, I was wrong -- but close.) The Von Richters take total control of Olivia’s life, confiscating her cell phone so she can’t call out, forcing her to walk for a half-hour each day, keeping her essentially captive in their homes (a Hollywood estate and a Palm Desert “vacation home” that’s at least 20 miles from any other sign of civilization -- the real Palm Desert is remote but I didn’t think it was that remote!) and stipulating everything she eats. Their menu for her includes eggs every morning (she can’t stand eggs, and this hit home for me because I can’t either: I can almost never have a breakfast “out” because just about every item on a restaurant’s morning menu includes eggs) and a total avoidance of sweets, though Olivia falls in love with the Von Richters’ cook Peter (Kenneth Miller) and he occasionally sneaks her a brownie.

At one point the Von Richters try to get Olivia to have a three-way with them and Ava calls her a “party-pooper” when she declines, and this plus the regular alcohol and drug abuse, along with the domestic violence, convinces Olivia that the Von Richters are not fit parents and the sooner she gets out of there and takes the kid, the better off both will be even though Olivia still doesn’t have a home or a job. Olivia gets so disgusted with her gilded cage and the prospect of loosing the Von Richters on the daughter (we know the sex by then) she’s carrying that at one point, seven and one-half months into the pregnancy, she steals a “Freshies” food van that has come to make a delivery and tries to escape -- only in the meantime the Von Richters call a press conference to announce that their surrogate has run off and her drinking and drug habits are endangering their child. (The needles they show are Hayden’s; he said he needed them to inject insulin because he’s diabetic, but at this point we’re thinking, “Yeah, right.”) She tries to report herself as a kidnap victim to the police, but by the time she gets to see anyone at the police station the Von Richters’ press conference has aired and, after Olivia attempts to grab a phone from a woman who’s obviously Transgender, the cops arrest her. Olivia gets returned to the Von Richters, only now the lock her in a room so she can’t make another escape attempt, and when she resists further they end up cuffing both her hands and her feet. Eventually Cassidy, who until then has been shown to be a basically decent person but one with total loyalty to the Von Richters, helps her escape after Hayden Von Richter leaves his wife and announces he’s going to file for divorce, which leads Ava to decide to have the baby aborted even though it’s been nearly nine months and you’d have to be a really hard-core pro-choicer not to question the ethics of a highly dangerous abortion then. Cassidy helps Olivia flee the Palm Desert redoubt but she gets lost in the desert when she drives out of cell-phone range and her GPS conks out.

Ava follows them, drives her two recalcitrant employees off the road, forces them out of the car and pulls a gun on them. Olivia grapples with her and gets the gun out of her hand, and during this confrontation Cassidy reveals the truth about Olivia’s pregnancy: not only could Ava not bring a pregnancy to term, she couldn’t even start one because she can’t produce fertilizable eggs. So Hayden and his doctor, Dr. Gregory (Hank Rogerson), extracted one of Olivia’s own eggs and fertilized it in vitro with Hayden’s sperm -- meaning the baby she’s been carrying is biologically hers -- and at the end Cassidy shoots Ava to keep her from killing Olivia and then dashes across the desert … whereupon director Gantt cuts to Olivia in the hospital having just given birth to a daughter and Peter the cook,who got fired from the Von Richters’ kitchen for helping Olivia try to escape, turning up as a sort of stepfather ex machina even though he doesn’t have any money or a place to live either. (Also for some reason Peter has lost the small but attractive and well-trimmed facial hair he had in the rest of the movie; when he shows up at Olivia’s bedside he’s clean-shaven, which makes him look dorkier and considerably less sexy -- though that may be the look Kenneth Miller prefers because his imdb.com head shot is also clean-shaven.) Though I couldn’t help but imagine a sequel in which Hayden Von Richter sues them for custody and says that because he has scads of money he’d be a much better parent to raise the girl (who after all is biologically his child as well as Olivia’s!), The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate was actually one of the better Lifetime movies I’ve seen recently. Writer Henggeler manages to create multidimensional characters out of these people instead of falling on Lifetime stereotypes (though she’s guilty of the flaw of a lot of Lifetime screenwriters in going insanely over-the-top at the end); Ava in particular comes off as a figure of real pathos, stuck in a toxic marriage, a downward career spiral and deep-seated feelings of inadequacy as a woman because she can’t reproduce au naturel -- though when her dark side comes out I couldn’t help but think that if someone were remaking The Wizard of Oz the Wicked Witch of the West would be a perfect comeback role for her. Gantt manages to get some genuine Gothic atmosphere out of the situations and the moderne environments they take place in (though Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1934 film The Black Cat remains the most convincing movie ever made in terms of reproducing a Gothic atmosphere in high-tech modern architecture!), and despite its ridiculous title this film is surprisingly entertaining, well acted throughout and several cuts above Lifetime’s norm for this sort of story.