Show Boat (Universal, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. I resumed the excursion my husband Charles and I are doing through the entire canon of film director James Whale in chronological order. We’d reached the point in 1936 at which Whale was assigned the direction of the big-budget Universal musical Show Boat, a turning point in his career in both good and bad ways. The good way is that this adaptation of a musical already considered a classic – it had debuted in 1927 and had been a success both then and in a 1932 revival – is a stupendous film, a near-ideal adaptation of its source. It was also a good story for James Whale – despite the opposition of the star, Irene Dunne, to him as director on the ground that he was British and therefore presumably couldn’t understand the culture of the American South – because it touched on so many of his favorite themes. It was based in and around the world of the theatre, which was always where he felt most at home; it was full of “outsider” characters who meet catastrophic ends due to racial and social prejudices (hooking Whale’s status both as a working-class Britisher who’d carefully adopted the accent and mannerisms of an aristocrat, and as a Gay man in a time in which living openly as such was a social and legal impossibility – though Whale tried as hard as he could); it offered opportunities for romantic scenes (something few of Whale’s previous movies had done – probably the closest was By Candlelight) and atmospheric cinematography; and it was an already proven property that had pushed through the barriers of what was considered possible on the Broadway stage as well as on film.

Show Boat began life as a novel by Edna Ferber, written in 1924 but not published until 1926, centered around Captain Andy Hawks (Charles Winninger), the owner of the Cotton Blossom show boat (though the name in the film was changed to Cotton Palace because apparently the owners of a real boat called the Cotton Blossom threatned to sue) which operates up and down the Mississippi River in the late 19th century; his wife Parthenia (Helen Westley), inevitably nicknamed “Parthy Ann”; their daughter Magnolia (Irene Dunne); the leading couple in the show boat’s plays, Julie LaVerne (Helen Morgan) and her husband Steve Baker (Donald Cook); and the two leading Black characters, boat hand Joe (Paul Robeson) and his wife Queenie, the cook (Hattie McDaniel). Julie turns out to be half-Black and she and Steve are driven off the show buat by local prejudices and the machinations of Pete (Arthur Hohl), a member of the show boat crew who has an unrequited crush on Julie, who’s incensed when Julie gives a necklace Pete gave her to the Black cook Queenie and exacts his revenge by getting a copy of Julie’s birth certificate which documents that her “mammy” was Black. Julie and Steve are driven off the show boat, while Captain Andy – very much against the wishes of his wife – presses their daughter Magnolia into the lead in his production. Needing a new leading man as well, he hires Gaylord Ravenal (Allan Jones), a riverfront gambler who needs to get out of Natchez, Mississippi in a hurry and is also smitten with Magnolia. The two become show boat stars and a couple off-stage as well, and they get married and have a daughter, Kim; but no sooner is she born and Magnolia recovered enough to travel than the Ravenals leave the show boat and head for Chicago.

When Gaylord is flush they stay at the Palmer House (for years Chicago’s finest, fanciest and highest-status hotel); when he’s broke they end up in furnished rooms with (stereo)typical Irish landladies hounding them for rent money. Throughout their financial ups and downs they keep Kim in a boarding school run by a convent, and one day Gaylord realizes that as much as he loves both his wife and daughter, his gambling addiction isn’t doing them any good long-term and he decides to leave them. By chance the comic-relief couple who performed with them on the show boat, Frank and Elly Schultz (Sammy White and Queenie Smith), run into Magnolia just as she’s broke, abandoned and out of options, and suggest she try out for a gig at the Trocadero nightclub in Chicago. Asked what sort of songs she sings, she tells the club manager, “I sing Negro songs” – to which he replies, “Oh, a coon shouter” (an odd term used in the early 20th century to mean a white singer who could sound Black; Sophie Tucker was promoted by Edison Records as a “coon shouter” and her breakthrough hit, “Some of These Days,” was by Black songwriter Shelton Brooks.) Their daughter Kim eventually grows up and follows in her mom’s (and her grandpa’s!) footsteps as an entertainer.

Edna Ferber’s novel is quite a bit darker than the script Oscar Hammerstein II came up with for the musical, for which he recruited Jerome Kern as composer even though Kern, like Hammerstein, had never written for such a dark story before. In the book Captain Andy is killed when he’s thrown off the show boat by a river storm and drowns in the Mississippi, and Julie, after she’s fired from the show boat and Steve leaves her, becomes Chicago’s leading madam. But even with the softening – including a late-in-life reunion for Magnolia and Gaylord at Julie’s Broadway debut and a different denouement for Julie’s character (she becomes a nightclub star in Chicago but blows her career on alcoholism and the unreliability it leads to), Show Boat was a weird story for a Broadway musical. Most musical shows until then had been either revues (shows which just alternated songs, dances and comic sketches and had no plot) or silly stories whose function was just to cue in the songs. Hammerstein got an option on the rights from Ferber, shopped around his idea for a musical that dealt openly with interracial relationships, gambling, alcoholism and other manifestations of the darker side of life – and got the go-ahead from, of all people, Florenz Ziegfeld, producer of the Ziegfeld Follies revues and noted for his extravagance (when he died in 1932 he was $4 million in debt and his actress wife, Billie Burke, had to go back to work to pay off his creditors) and aversion to anything serious on his stages, nonetheless put Show Boat into production – and was rewarded with an enormous hit.

The first time Show Boat became a movie was in 1929. Even before the musical was made Universal had purchased the film rights to Ferber’s book, and when the musical came through and became a big stage hit they made sure they got the rights to it as well. Only they’d already started filming the Ferber novel before they closed the deal for the musical – with Harry Pollard directing just after he’d made a successful film of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, another movie about racial politics and customs in the South – as a silent, and what emerged when they finally finished was an assemblage including silent sequences, sound scenes and songs – but not the Kern-Hammerstein songs from the play because producer and entrepreneur Billy Rose had convinced Universal’s executives that everyone was tired of hearing those songs and they should hire him to write a new score. When Universal previewed the film, audiences protested that the Kern-Hammerstein songs weren’t in it, so they filmed a 20-minute prologue with members of the show’s stage cast featured in some of the original songs. The 1929 Show Boat survives only in partial form, with some scenes having picture but no sound (not even the synchronized music-and-effects track the film had when first released), some (including half of the prologue) having sound but no picture, but enough survives to indicate that Pollard had made a reasonably impressive film. He also got one detail right that both Whale and George Sidney, who made a third version for MGM in 1951, got wrong: a show boat was not a self-propelled steamboat. It was a barge that was moved up and down the river by a tug which was called a “tow boat,” but contrary to the impression you’d get from the name, instead of being in front of the show boat it was behind it, pushing it forward. (Ferber took pains to get this right in her novel, including making sure she had Captain Andy give the proper orders to the tow boat’s crew.)

In the mid-1930’s, Universal decided to remake the movie and draw as many of the cast members as possible from the stage casts, including Irene Dunne as Magnolia and Paul Robeson as Joe. Neither had been in the 1927 premiere – though Dunne had taken over from the original Magnolia, Norma Terriss, during the first run. Jules Bledsoe, one of Robeson’s rivals (along with Roland Hayes) for the Black-male-concert-singer market niche, was the first Joe, but Robeson had played the part in the 1932 revival (Ziegfeld’s last production and one he put on because he was hoping it would be a sure-fire hit and would help pay off his debts). The first Queenie was Tess Gardella, who was actually white but played a lot of character roles in blackface and was also the first model for Aunt Jemima (and a box of Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix with her picture on it is prominently featured in Hattie McDaniel’s kitchen in the 1936 film). Universal wanted to borrow Nelson Eddy, then riding the sensational success of his films Naughty Marietta and Rose Marie with Jeanette MacDonald, from MGM to play Gaylord, but Jerome Kern vetoed that, saying, “Eddy’s a baritone. I wrote it for a tenor.” The actor they hired was, ironically, Allan Jones, whose turn-down of Naughty Marietta had paved the way for Eddy’s stardom.

The assignment of James Whale as director ticked off a lot of people in the cast – including Irene Dunne, who wondered what a British director whose most famous previous credit was Frankenstein would know about directing a musical about the American South, but one cast member Whale did get along with was Robeson. While most of Show Boat is filmed relatively straightforwardly (except for the virtually constant camera movement, one of Whale’s trademarks), the scene in which Robeson sings “Ol’ Man River” is dazzling in its virtuosity. It looks like we’ve suddenly been catapulted into the world of music videos as Whale takes Robeson off the waterfront set at which he begins the number and puts him in various setups that dramatize the song’s lyrics. It’s a blessing that we not only have a filmed performance of Robeson doing what became his trademark song, but one directed by a genius instead of a Hollywood (or British) hack – albeit a Gay genius whom I’ve long believed, judging from the number of excuses Whale found to show Robeson topless, had a crush on him.

As for Julie, they got another veteran of the on-stage casts, Helen Morgan, and there’s an uncomfortable life-imitates-art parallel in that she too was a major cabaret star who blew her career on alcohol – though she’s absolutely stunning in the role. Like Rouben Mamoulian in Morgan’s first film, Applause (1929), Whale was able to get her to act with wrenching dramatic power – and John Mescall, the cinematographer Whale insisted on using despite his own issues with the bottle, photographs her so stunningly she looks younger here than she had in the 1934 film Marie Galante even though that was made two years earlier. The 1936 Show Boat was both an artistic and a commercial success, but it cost Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. their control of Universal, the studio the senior Laemmle had founded in 1912. The Laemmles had put their two most important directors, Whale and John Stahl, in charge of big-budget movies – Whale’s Show Boat and Stahl’s Magnificent Obsession, made a year earlier – and both went way over budget and schedule, with the overages on Show Boat eating up the big grosses on Magnificent Obsession almost as soon as they came in.

To keep the studio going, Laemmle, Sr. cut a deal with a financier named J. Cheever Cowdin who ran what today would be called a hedge fund, and Cowdin agreed to lend Universal money but on the condition that if the loan weren’t paid back in time, he would have the option to force Laemmle to sell him the studio. (Most accounts of this transaction have depicted it as an awful deal Laemmle was forced to accept, but in his James Whale biography James Curtis claims Laemmle was actually anxious to sell the studio and retire.) Laemmle fell behind on the loan and Cowdin took over the studio two days after Whale finished shooting. Cowdin put a former Paramount executive named Charles Rogers in charge of the company and ordered a stop to Universal’s famous run of horror films in favor of low-budget romances and comedies. Universal hung out through the rest of the 1930’s largely on the strength of Deanna Durbin’s films (a pity she didn’t arrive in time to play the young adult Kim Ravenal in the final sequence of Show Boat!) and in 1941, under yet another new management team, they scored the most successful film of the year, Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates. Show Boat ended up making a ton of money for Universal but it was Cowdin and his investors, not the Laemmles, who got the profits.

What’s more, Whale found himself no longer working for a foreign-born boss like Laemmle who hadn’t given a damn that he was Gay, but for typical American homophobes of the period. After the failure of Whale’s next Universal film, The Road Back – based on an anti-Nazi novel by Erich Maria Remarque which was eviscerated in the cutting room after the German government objected and Rogers, worried about the effect a ban on Universal’s films in Germany and allied countries would do to the studio financially, yielded and recut the film to sanitize it according to the Germans’ demands – Whale’s partner, David Lewis, set him up at Warner Bros. with a one-film deal to make The Great Garrick, yet another costume drama about theatre people. Alas, The Great Garrick was the sort of sophisticated connoisseur’s picture that was bound to attract a limited audience then or since, so he went back to Universal, worked out his contract in “B” pictures and eventually retired unhappily in 1941.

Chuck Berry: Brown-Eyed Handsome Man (PBS-TV, aired February 27, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After running Show Boat I put on KPBS for a pledge-break special tied in with Black History Month: Chuck Berry: Brown-Eyed Handsome Man, a clip show documenting Berry’s history and the sheer extent of his influence on musicians since, including almost everyone who’s played rock. Berry is sometimes referred to as the inventor of rock ’n’ roll, which he wasn’t – before him there had been Louis Jordan, Roy Brown and Fats Domino, among quite a few other talents who were relegated to the Black charts (called “race music” in the 1930’s and rhythm-and-blues in the 1940’s – in an interview with Blues Unlimited magazine Domino recalled, “I’d always thought of myself as a rhythm-and-blues musician. Then they told me I was playing rock ’n’ roll. I hadn’t changed my style any – they’d just changed the name for it!”) And, as Charles reminded me, before any of them there had been Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who’d debuted on records in 1937 as a gospel singer backing herself on acoustic guitar, but within four years she’d bought an electric guitar, joined Lucky Millinder’s band and made records like “Shout, Sister, Shout” and “That’s All” that are rock in all but name (and incidentally also showcase how much the whole rock style was rooted in the gospel music of the Black church).

When Chuck Berry died in 2017 – just a month or so before the scheduled release of his first new studio album in 28 years – it occurred to me that he had the same historical role in rock that Louis Armstrong had had in jazz. He was not the first Black innovator in the form but he pulled so many strands of Black musical culture (and not just Black culture as well; Berry had a strong interest in white country music and his friend and Chess label-mate Bo Diddley once said, “Chuck’s always really wanted to be a country singer”) together he created a powerful new sound. He also created a body of work that, more than any other single singer-songwriter, shaped the repertoire of future bands. Asked why through most of his career he didn’t have a band of his own, but relied on hiring pickup bands in whatever city he played in, Berry said, “You don’t know rock ’n’ roll if you don’t know Chuck Berry.” But there’s an ironic tale in Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography that in his early days, before he became a star himself, Springsteen and his band were hired to back Chuck Berry. They didn’t think this would be a problem since they knew a lot of Berry’s songs – but when they rehearsed with him they discovered, to their shock, that they did not know them in the keys in which Berry played them.

The film doesn’t touch on some of the darker sides of Berry’s legend – including his jail sentences or the account of his long-time pianist Johnny Johnson that the Berry licks weren’t all that new – they were simply boogie-woogie piano licks Berry asked Johnson to demonstrate for him and then learned to play on guitar – and as a portrait of Berry’s influences on other musicians it’s hardly as good as the 1987 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll, directed by Taylor Hackford and mostly filmed at a concert in London celebrating Berry’s 60th birthday, in which he played onstage with major names in their own right like Linda Ronstadt and members of the Rolling Stones. Nonetheless, it’s an excellent portrayal and features quite a few of Chuck Berry’s best-known songs, both with him performing them and in clips of other bands with major reputations. It begins with a clip from Berry himself performing his song “Carol” (though this isn’t mentioned in the film, it was also the first song ever recorded by the Rolling Stones – a band which came about because one day Mick Jagger and Keith Richards walked past each other on a London street; one was carrying a Chuck Berry album and one was carrying a Muddy Waters album, and they complimented each other on their taste in music and then became friends and, ultimately, bandmates) and then a brief segment in which we hear Berry’s first record, “Maybelline,” over a narration by Danny Glover explaining how Berry got his career break.

After years of playing small blues clubs in his native St. Louis, he got the chance to record at age 28 (awfully late in life for a rock star!) when Muddy Waters recommended him to Leonard and Phil Chess. Berry showed up in the studio with a blues called “Wee Wee Hours” in the romantic ballad-blues style of Charles Brown, Chess recorded it and then asked Berry if he had anything they could use for the flip side. Berry started jamming on Bob Wills’ old country tune “Ida Red” and shortly thereafter Berry, Johnson, the Chess studio musicians and the Chess brothers themselves had tweaked it into a novelty song about a street race between the villain’s Cadillac and the hero’s V-8 Ford, punctuated with a chorus which took its name from a popular woman’s cosmetic brand: “Oh Maybelline, why can’t you be true?/You just started back something doing things you shouldn’t do.” As often happened in the days when single records, not albums, dominated the rock market, disc jockeys decided “Maybelline” was the song to play, audiences made it a hit and, according to Glover, a lot of white radio stations picked up on it and started playing it – until enough photos of Berry got out to let people know he was Black.

The next clip was from the 1956 movie Rock, Rock, Rock! – which the narrator said was the first rock ’n’ roll movie ever made (it was actually the third of Alan Freed’s productions, after Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock) – a product of the introduction of magnetic recording on both records and films, and the decision of movie producers that instead of requiring musicians to re-record their songs for films, they could just use the already made records and have the players mime to them.(One clip I’m glad they didn’t use was Berry’s surprisingly anemic and nervous appearance doing “Sweet Little Sixteen” in the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival; despite the triumphalism of imdb.com reviewer “Stephen-357” that “this particular slice of time has special significance, because jazz would soon be replaced in popularity by Rock & Roll. We watch it happen before our eyes as a young Chuck Berry takes the stage, backed by some excellent jazz musicians, all looking ‘amused’ but not taking very seriously the music that would knock them off the charts for good within a couple of years,” the fact is Berry looks ill at ease and hardly shows his usual command of the stage – and even with such formidable competition as Berry, Dinah Washington and Big Maybelle, the person in Jazz on a Summer’s Day who rocks the hardest is gospel singer Mahalia Jackson!)

After the clip from Rock, Rock, Rock! – Berry singing “You Can’t Catch Me” (for which the great blues pianist Otis Spann replaced Johnson and really cooked!) in front of a plain backdrop but comfortable in his stage moves, and the only glimpse we get here of Berry in his absolute prime, when he was still a creative musician instead of a nostalgia act – we start with the covers. The Rolling Stones are shown doing a cover of “Around and Around” in a clip from the classic 1965 T.A.M.I. Show, wretchedly colorized (just about everyone, on stage and in the audience, looks sunburned) and featuring the Stones more nervous than usual – Mick Jagger waves his tush at the audience in a foredoomed attempt to top the act he had to follow on that program, James Brown. Next up is a live Beatles clip from the Washington, D.C. appearance that was the Beatles’ first U.S. concert, doing “Roll Over, Beethoven” with George Harrison singing lead (John or Paul could have done it better, but they had to let George sing something) and having to move from Paul’s mike to John’s when he realizes Paul’s is dead, but still outplaying the Stones and re-establishing their credentials as the best rock ’n’ roll band of all time.

Next up is Jimi Hendrix doing “Johnny B. Goode” from the film Jimi Plays Berkeley, shot on Hendrix’ final U.S. tour in 1970 with the best band he ever led (Billy Cox, electric bass; Mitch Mitchell, drums) and for the most part played “straight,” though there are some of those unique sounds Hendrix got with his whammy bar and rubbing the strings on the fretboard without strumming them. (In 1985 the jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan was hailed as such an innovator for being able to sound guitar strings by rubbing instead of picking them – a Hendrix innovation that got lost in the sheer number of creative effects Hendrix cooked up.) There’s also a bit of Hendrix plucking the guitar strings with his teeth – an effect he learned from the great bluesman Aaron “T-Bone” Walker when Hendrix toured the chit’lin’ circuit in bands that opened for Walker. After a pledge break we got Linda Ronstadt doing “Back in the U.S.A.” in her guest shot from Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll; she made a record of the song but did it far better here, obviously inspired by the man himself being on stage with her.

Then, blessedly, we got some more of Berry himself – “Nadine” (his set opener when I saw Berry myself in 1971 on a rock ’n’ roll oldies show with Little Richard and Bo Diddley), “Sweet Little Sixteen” and a version of “Johnny B. Goode” from one of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame concerts with Bruce Springsteen billed as a duet partner but really just a backup singer and guitarist. Oddly, Berry looks darker here than he did in the earlier clips; I suspect that his early appearances were filmed with harsher lighting to make him look lighter (though he still looked totally African-American), followed by the Electric Light Orchestra at their Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, playing their 1972 hit version of “Roll Over, Beethoven” that blended Berry’s song with the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (not the Ninth, as claimed in Glover’s narration). Incidentally ELO leader Jeff Lynne must have learned the song from the Beatles’ cover, since he makes the same mistake in the lyrics they did: he sings “Reel it, rock it, roll it over,” where the line Berry wrote was “Reel and rock with one another.”

The next clips were Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers doing “Carol” (an interesting song because Petty mostly featured his keyboard player, Benmont Tench, on piano – restoring all those boogie licks Johnny Johnson taught Berry to their original instrument) and Paul McCartney doing “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” from a TV special that took him back to the Cavern Club in Liverpool where the Beatles had got one of their first big breaks. (Actually they’d started out in an even smaller club, the Casbah, run by Mona Best, whose son Pete Best was the drummer the Beatles fired on the eve of stardom.) Then we got three more songs from Berry himself: “Let It Rock,” “Memphis, Tennessee” (in a more laid-back version than usual that made it sound more country than rock) and “Johnny B. Goode” as intro music over the closing credits. This isn’t exactly the greatest film tribute Chuck Berry ever got (that would be Hail, Hail, Rock ’n’ Roll! – whose title came from “School Days,” one of Berry’s best songs and oddly not performed here), but it’s a nice assemblage of some of the greatest rock songs ever written played by some of the greatest rock acts of all time.

The Last Warning (Universal, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I played Charles the new Blu-Ray disc of a 1929 film from Universal, The Last Warning, directed by Paul Leni, who had become an international star filmmaker from his 1924 film Waxworks. Waxworks was an all-star production from UFA studios in Leni’s native Germany that featured Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt and William Dieterle in a story that used the device of a wax-figure exhibit in an amusement park to tell various historical tales of such gruesome figures as Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper. Dieterle plays “The Poet,” who narrates the stories of these people as part of the show given by the owner of the wax-figures exhibit. Universal hired Leni in 1927 and for his first film in the U.S. gave him The Cat and the Canary, an old barnstorming play about a young heiress being subjected to a plot to drive her insane and thereby disqualify her from her inheritance. The Cat and the Canary was a huge hit and is remembered today as a successful fusion of Leni’s stylized visual style with Hollywood conventions.

Leni’s next film, The Chinese Parrot, is based on Earl Derr Biggers’ second Charlie Chan novel and is regrettably lost today (though less likely silent films have turned up and so hope springs eternal), not only because it was apparently an equally interesting showcase for Leni’s visual style but because Charlie Chan was actually played by an Asian, Japanese actor Sojin Kamiyama. Leni’s third American film was The Man Who Laughs, for which Universal wanted to re-team the stars of The Phantom of the Opera, Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin – only Chaney was by then an MGM star and they couldn’t reach a loanout deal, so they hired Conrad Veidt to play the part of Gwynplaine, a prince facially altered by gypsies so he could do nothing but grin (a Jack P. Pierce makeup later copied by Batman creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger for the character of the Joker). It did well but probably not as well as it could have if they’d been able to get Chaney for the male lead – Veidt was great at stylized villainy but he couldn’t sound the pathos in characters like this the way Chaney could – and if it hadn’t got caught in the silent-to-sound transition. Originally shot as a silent, The Man Who Laughs had a synchronized recorded score attached and a few scenes in which human voices are heard “wild” (i.e., not specifically connected to the picture), notably one in which crowd noises are dubbed in as Philbin, in her role as a gypsy dancing girl, is about to perform.

The Last Warning turned out to be Leni’s last film – shortly after it was made he died at age 44 of blood poisoning from an abcessed tooth – and it re-teamed him with Laura La Plante, the leading lady of The Cat and the Canary and an actress Universal tried for years to build into a star (while they fired the young Bette Davis after three minor roles and three loan-outs) in a story that begins with a performance of a play called The Snare that ends abruptly when its leading actor, John Woodford (D’Arcy Corrigan), dies for real during an intense confrontation scene as he’s reaching for a prop candlestick. The scandal drives the theatre out of business for years (exactly how many years we’re not told by writers Alfred Cohn, Thomas Fallon, J. G. Hawks, Robert F. Hill and Tom Reed, adapting a novel called The House of Fear by Wadsworth Camp) until it’s suddenly reopened by a mysterious producer named Arthur McHugh (Montagu Love) who plans to reunite the original cast of The Snare and put the play on anew – only the same bad guy who knocked off Woodford is still around and targets Harvey Carleton (Roy D’Arcy), who’s been cast in the dead Woodford’s old part. Leni’s directorial touches are evident mainly in the prismatic montage sequences that show Broadway at play while the deadly goings-on are happening at the Woodford theatre and the almost relentless camera movements that follow the actors.

The Last Warning was released as a part-talkie with dialogue sequences as well as a synchronized music-and-effects soundtrack, but it also went out in an alternate all-silent version for the rapidly shrinking handful of theatres that still hadn’t wired for sound by 1929. It’s not clear whether the part-talkie survives, but if it does I’d rather have seen it than the one Universal just restored, which is the silent version (pieced together from partial 35mm and 16mm prints – and you can tell which scenes came from which print) in reasonably good image quality, but with a new and sometimes anachronistic score by Arthur Barrow. Frankly, if the original soundtrack records still exist I’d have preferred either to have heard them or been given the choice – especially since Leni didn’t live long enough to direct a full-sound feature and therefore the dialogue scenes for The Last Warning (assuming he shot them, which wasn’t always the case with sound sequences inserted into otherwise silent films) would be the only time Leni worked with sound. Reviews of the time praised Leni’s directorial style (though the borrowings from The Phantom of the Opera – notably the collapse of a backstage staircase when the bad guy cuts the rope suspending it the way the Phantom cut the chain to a chandelier, and the final scene in which the suspected killer does a monkey-like series of climbs through the theatre’s rafters and keeps evading capture – are pretty obvious) but criticized the film for being virtually incomprehensible plot-wise. In 1939 Universal did an hour-long “B” remake which reverted to Wadsworth Camp’s original title, The House of Fear, and once again hired an expatriate German director (Joe May), for a film which made a lot more sense – in that version it was made clear that the mystery producer was actually a police official who had seized on the original murder as a cold case and was restaging the play to solve it at last – but didn’t have the stylistics of Leni’s film.

Alibi (Roland West Productions, United Artists, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Thougn I haven’t posted my journal comments on it until now, on February 11 I ran my husband Charles and I a movie I got on a grey-label DVD mastered from a Kino on Video VHS we’d already watched many years before: Alibi, a 1929 gangster movie directed by the enigmatic Roland West. William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film describes West as an independently wealthy dilettante who made films simply because he liked doing so. In 1926 he had become a star director with a silent film called The Bat, featuring a super-villain who poses as a detective and also dons a bat-like costume; Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, admitted he borrowed the character of Batman from this film even though his Batman was a superhero instead of a super-villain. (Kane also acknowledged he got the look of the Joker from Conrad Veidt’s makeup in the 1928 Paul Leni classic The Man Who Laughs.) Alibi was West’s first talkie, and he produced, directed and co-wrote (with C. Gardner Sullivan) the script based on a play called Nightstick by John Griffith Wray, J. C. Nugent and Elaine S. Carrington. One thing I learned when I first saw this film was why a police officer’s baton is called a “nightstick”; in the days before police had radios with which they could communicate with each other over long distances, they would use the nightsticks and hammer them against the sides of buildings or on a paved concrete sidewalk to call for backup when they needed it.

Alibi stars Chester Morris (in what William K. Everson calls “a James Cagney performance, well before Cagney” – though Cagney would make his first film, Sinners’ Holiday, just one year after Alibi) as Chick Williams, a convict who in the film’s marvelously expressionistic and dialogue-free opening scene is being released from prison and making the expected promises that when he gets out he’s going to find a job and lead a respectable, law-abiding life. Only the next time we see him he’s getting sucked into masterminding a fur robbery with Soft Malone (Elmer Ballard), who drives a cab as his “cover” and uses it to transport Chick and the other crooks to the site of the job and then haul away some of the stolen furs. A cop spots the robbery in progress and gets shot and killed by Chick, but before he dies other cops respond to his backup call and arrest at least some of the robbers, recovering some of the stolen furs. Meanwhile, Chick has been dating Joan Manning (Eleanor Griffith), daughter of police sergeant Pete Manning (Purnell Pratt), who of course warns his daughter not to date Chick and even threatens to disown her if she keeps seeing him. Chick worked out an elaborate alibi for the night of the robbery – he took Joan to a theatre to watch a musical (which gives Roland West an excuse to show a chorus line in action – in fact there’s also a nightclub with another chorus line, and West introduces it with a tracking shot from the street inside the club that may have been where Alfred Hitchcock got the idea for the famous long tracking shot through a dance hall that reveals the killer in Young and Innocent – only he timed it so he could go to the fur warehouse and participate in the robbery during the show’s intermission.

The police figure this out and do the drive themselves to determine that Chick could have done it, so Chick needs someone who’ll testify that he was on the phone to this person from the theatre during the intermission. Only the someone to stand his false alibi, picked by fellow crook Buck Bachman (Harry Stubbs), is Danny McGann (Regis Toomey), who poses as a perpetually inebriated stockbroker but is really an undercover cop. Chick shoots McGann but yet another cop, Tommy Glennon (Pat O’Malley), who’s also Chick’s rival for Joan’s affections, figures out the whole thing and corners Chick, insisting he’s going to shoot Chick in the back the way Chick shot McGann. Actually it’s a trick; Glennon has loaded his gun with blanks and he scares Chick into fainting as if dead, then announces that he’s shown Chick up as the yellow-bellied coward he is. Chick tries to flee and he gets out of the building and leaps across the street to the building next door – but he can’t keep his hold on the other building and ends up falling to his death.

Alibi is a frustrating movie because so much of it is done well one’s even more impatient with the glitches of early talkies than usual – particularly the careful beats the actors take between hearing their cue line and delivering their own, as well as the noisy recording which sometimes makes it hard to figure out what the actors are saying. The film’s most powerful moments are the ones that were shot silent and had sound added later – the sort of thing Sergei Eisenstein had in mind when he said the future belonged to “the sound film,” which would not have dialogue but would use music and synchronized sound effects to tell its story and add to the visuals. Alibi is also a frustrating movie because the basic story is a strong one and one wishes it could have been made – or remade – better a few years later. I found myself wishing Warner Bros. would have bought the remake rights, put one of their speedfreak directors in charge and cast Cagney and Humphrey Bogart as the male leads. It’s also got so much singing and dancing in it – including at least one vocal from Eleanor Griffith – it practically qualifies as a musical, though at least the nightclub in the opening scene is small enough it actually looks like a nightclub and not an airplane hangar done up in Art Deco. In fact so many of Willliam Cameron Menzies’ sets are Deco that they practically become characters themselves – and when the crooks flee from indoors to outdoors the cityscapes are so blatantly artificial and stylized it looks like they’ve escaped into the expressionistic world of Fritz Lang’s M.

On the other hand, a lot of the outdoor night scenes – notably the one in which Chick takes Soft’s taxi to the robbery site – are done in fast-motion, and today people associate fast-motion in films only with comedy. Indeed, the first time I saw that cab I thought it was a toy being propelled down model streets, and it was only when Chester Morris got out of it that I realized it was a real car! There’s also one rather underdeveloped character who had real potential to add pathos to the story – Daisy Thomas (Mae Busch, long-time favorite of Erich von Stroheim, Laurel and Hardy and Jackie Gleason), mistress of Buck Bachman, who laments that she left a comfortable life with a nice, respectable, well-to-do husband to run off with Buck, who slaps her around and locks her in rooms for reasons that aren’t especially clear. I found Alibi reminiscent of another 1929 talkie by a major filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, which also features a potentially strong plot involving a hero-heroine-villain love triangle (a device Hitchcock used again and again in The Secret Agent, Sabotage, Notorious and North by Northwest, among others) and also alternates scenes with creative visuals and sound effects with other scenes that all too faithfully reflect the ponderousness of many early sound films – only Hitchcock continued to direct for nearly another half-century while West retired after just two more films, The Bat Whispers (a sound remake of his 1926 silent hit The Bat and an early example of a wide-screen process called “Magnifilm” over two decades before wide screens became standard) and Corsair (yet another gangster story).

The Bat Whispers (Roland West Productions, Joseph M. Schenck Productions, United Artists, Magnifilm, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When my husband Charles arrived home from work early enough last night to watch a movie, I ran The Bat Whispers, a 1930 talkie remake of the Mary Roberts Rinehart-Avery Hopwood play The Bat that had previously been filmed as a silent in 1926 by the same director, Roland West. The film doesn’t have a screenplay credit but apparently Roland West did the adaptation himself. West was independently wealthy and, like Howard Hughes, took up film production simply because he thought it would be fun to make movies. He was known not only for making movies whose stories took place at night but actually shooting them at night, and he was a director of real visual imagination. Charles and I had recently watched his first sound film, Alibi (1929), though apparently my journal comments on it didn’t make it to the moviemagg blog, and it was a nicely plotted gangster thriller even though it had some of the typical problems of early talkies.

The Bat Whispers begins with a marvelous first reel featuring long tracking shots of New York cityscapes (albeit mostly done with models) before we discover a plot via the intriguing device of a police radio we overhear as cops are driving to the scene of a crime that hasn’t happened yet. It seems that the mysterious masked and hooded criminal “The Bat” has threatened to steal a priceless necklace from a New York multimillionaire at midnight, and the cops have staked out his apartment building in hopes of catching The Bat. Come midnight the rich guy opens his safe, takes out the necklace and fingers it – and then The Bat bursts in through his window, having climbed up the side of the building with a rope, and steals the necklace, explaining in a note he leaves for the police that the millionaire’s clock was fast and the police were slow. Charles noted that quite a few of the movies we’ve been watching lately from the cusp of the silent-sound transition had scenes in which people seemed dwarfed by the stunning oversized buildings.

Alas, after this splendid opening scene – including some shots so expressionistic I joked that Roland West must have seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and had an orgasm right there in the theatre – The Bat Whispers turns flat and ordinary once it gets to the home of banker Courtleigh Fleming (whom we never see) in the New York countryside. A wealthy eccentric named Cornelia Van Gorder and her long-suffering maid Lizzie Allen, who says she’s stuck with her through socialism, Fletcherism (a diet regimen of the time) and theosophy “but I draw the line at spooksism!”, have leased the Fleming estate for the summer while the banker is presumably on a European vacation, but in fact his whereabouts are unknown and they made the deal with Fleming’s scapegrace nephew Richard (Hugh Huntley), who did an unauthorized lease deal for the house to subsidize his gambling addiction. It’s unclear who plays Cornelia and the maid; the cast list on imdb.com says Grayce Hampton was Cornelia and Maude Eburne as the maid, but I’ve seen Eburne in enough movies (incliuding the 1933 Warners women’s prison drama Ladies They Talk About, in which Eburne plays a dowager actress who ended up in prison for poisoning her faithless husband), that I think she was Cornelia and Hampton was the maid).

The dialogue references $500,000 that was supposedly robbed from the Fleming bank, though it seems more like an embezzlement given that Richard Fleming and bank clerk Mr. Bell (Richard Tucker) are the prime suspects. Supposedly one or both of them have hidden the money on the Fleming estate, where they show up to retrieve it (Bell poses as a gardener but has uncalloused hands and doesn’t know the first thing about plants) and “The Bat” shows up to steal it. The film alternates marvelous Old Dark House-style sequences with really dull dialogue scenes probably taken verbatim, or nearly so, from the Rinehart-Hopwood play, and it doesn’t help that the movie was shot in an early wide-screen process called “Magnifilm” that just renders the piece even more static than the norm for an early talkie. I’ve read that West shot two versions of this film simultaneously, one in Magnifilm and one in the normal 4:3 aspect ratio of the time, and that the 4:3 version is actually a better movie because it contained more shot-reverse shot editing and more closeups. (When a few films were shot in experimental wide-screen processes around 1930 the directors were told that because of the sheer size of the screen, closeups were no longer necessary – and when wide-screen processes like CinemaScope were reintroduced in the early 1950’s and quickly became standard, directors were once again given that piece of stupid advice.) A police officer named Detective Anderson (Chester Morris) shows up, ostensibly to investigate the crimes and catch “The Bat,” but in the end [spoiler alert!] he turns out to be The Bat, having kidnapped and tied up the real detective.

The Bat Whispers is a really disappointing movie, all too typical of mediocre early talkies in the slowness of its pacing, the stentorian delivery of dialogue by the actors, and only an occasional scene here and there that shows any visual or auditory imagination. There are a few bits that anticipate Val Lewton’s use of sound in his films in the mid-1940’s, notably the ghostly tapping the characters hear that turns out to be Richard Fleming tapping the walls to see where a secret room might be hidden in which the money is stashed, and a bump-bump-bump that turns out to be a bowling ball rolling down a staircase. (Why?) There are also some spectacular scenes in which characters make quick escapes by hurling themselves down a laundry chute – with a strategically placed pile of laundry to break their fall at the end (just as Lizzie at one point gets pitched out of a second-story window and lands in a bit of shrubbery that cushions her landing and saves her life), and there’s a clever bit at the end in which a curtain is drawn over the final action and Chester Morris comes out as himself and pleads with the audience not to tell their friends how the movie ends. Mostly, though, The Bat Whispers is pretty slow going, and while The Bat in this movie (albeit a villain) was cited by comics artist Bob Kane as his inspiration for the character of Batman, it’s obvious he got the bat iconography more from the silent version (in which the Bat’s costume is a good deal more convincing than it is here!) than this one (just as he took the look of the Joker from Jack P. Pierce’s marvelous makeup on Conrad Veidt in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs). There’s also a scene that I’m surprised Charles didn’t call out because it’s a pet peeve of his: the little satchel that supposedly contains the stolen $500,000 is the size of a doctor’s bag and couldn’t possibly contain that much cash.

The Last Performance, a.k.a. The Twelve Swords (Universal, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film Charles and I watched last night was The Last Performance, a 1929 Universal production directed by Paul Fejos and appearing in his filmography right after the big-budget musical Broadway. It was the third film of his on the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray disc that also included the marvelous Lonesome (1928), a bittersweet love story that made this Hungarian director’s American reputation and got him the assignment to make Broadway. The Last Performance was Universal’s attempt to reunite Conrad Veidt and Mary Philbin, the co-stars of Paul Leni’s late silent The Man Who Laughs (1928) in a story that, like The Man Who Laughs, would have been a more suitable vehicle for Lon Chaney, Sr. The Last Performance was originally released in the U.S. as a part-talkie but the only version known to exist is an all-silent print that survived in Denmark in relatively poor image quality and with Danish credits and intertitles that were retained in this release – with English subtitles under the Danish titles.

The Danish version was also retitled The Twelve Swords, after the famous stage magicians’ trick reproduced in the film: the magician locks his assistant in a trunk and drives 12 swords through it, then withdraws them again, then opens the box and the assistant emerges safe and sound. The film shows how the illusion is done – the sort of thing that makes real stage magicians angry because they don’t like audiences to see how they work their “magic” – the trunk contains a trap door on the side the assistant can open, roll out of the trunk and then get back in again after the swords are inserted and then pulled out. The trick is performed by Erik the Great (Conrad Veidt), a world-famous magician who’s in love with his assistant, Julie Fergeron (Mary Philbin) and is engaged to marry her after his current tour. Only a young man named Mark Royce (Fred MacKaye) breaks into Erik’s hotel room to steal some of his food so he can eat. Erik takes pity on him and hires him as the assistant to Erik’s assistant Buffo Black (Leslie Fenton). The film starts out in Copenhagen, then moves to Paris and finally ends up in New York, where Erik has got his long-awaited bid to perform in the U.S.

Erik hosts a giant party to celebrate the announcement of his upcoming wedding to Julie, only he raises a curtain behind which Julie and Mark were making out and realizes he’s lost her to the other, younger and considerably less strange guy. (Since “Erik” was also the name of Lon Chaney’s character in The Phantom of the Opera, in which Philbin was the female lead, I joked that Mary Philbin was used to being cruised by weirdos named Erik.) Erik pretends to be O.K. with his fiancée leaving him for another guy, but he secretly hatches a revenge plot: he will put Mark onstage and have him do the twelve-swords trick, only when the swords are pulled out there is blood on one of them and when the trunk is opened Beppo is found stabbed to death. Mark is arrested and put on trial for Beppo’s murder, but at the end of the proceedings Erik has a change of heart and demands to be heard. He explains that he killed Beppo before the performance, then hid his body in the trunk so it would look like Mark had killed him. His object was that Mark would be convicted of murder, presumably executed and then Julie would come back to him – only after his confession Erik pulls out a small dagger and, after taking far longer to do it than any self-respecting actor playing Othello, uses the dagger to commit suicide.

The Last Performance, written by James Ashmore Creelman (a journalist and travel writer who wrote an absurdly fawning profile of Mexican dictator Porfirio Diáz before becoming a screenwriter; he worked on the early drafts of King Kong until producer-directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack rejected his work as too elaborate to be filmed), with titles by Walter Anthony and Tom Reed. It is the sort of movie that works as O.K. entertainment but is too predictable to be truly great – all too often, as Dwight Macdonald said about formulaic movies, we feel like we’re a reel or so ahead of the filmmakers instead of behind them, where we should be. Part of the problem is Conrad Veidt; when Charles and I watched The Man Who Laughs I regretted that the original actor they’d planned to star in it, Lon Chaney, was contractually unavailable (he’d signed with the Goldwyn Company, later part of MGM, in 1922 while he still owed Universal two films under his previous contract; Universal used those commitments to make The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, but after Phantom MGM had Chaney locked up for the rest of his career), and missed the pathos Chaney could have brought to the film. I found myself missing the pathos Chaney could have brought to The Last Performance, too: Veidt was a powerful screen presence but there’s a reason why his two best-known parts – as the sinister somnambulist Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at the beginning of his career and the Nazi villian Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca at its end – cast him as stylized figures of menace.

Through most of The Last Performance Veidt just glowers at the camera and gives it burning stares that establish that this is a man not to be trifled with – but one misses the extra dimension of sadness Chaney could have brought to the role (and did in the quite similarly plotted Laugh, Clown, Laugh, a year earlier in 1928). There are a few of Fejos’s visual fireworks, notably several superimposition scenes (instead of standard intercutting, Fejos seems to have favored double exposure as his means of indicating that two actions were occurring in different places at the same time) and two long tracking shots down a banquet table (though director Clarence Brown had already done that in the 1925 film The Eagle, Rudolph Valentino’s next-to-last movie, with a breakaway table that split apart to accommodate the camera dolly and then came back together again – this must have discomfited some of the actors!) – but there’s not much he could do to liven up an all-too-predictable story. With my penchant for imagining quite darker endings to classic-era films that twisted story logic to send the audience out comforted and in a good mood, I found myself wishing Erik would have outright murdered Julie and Mark along the lines of similarly plotted operas like Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Puccini’s Il Tabarro – and, quite frankly, Conrad Veidt could have played total, unrestrained homicidal madness quite a bit than he could remorseful suicide!

Lonesome (Universal, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched two movies from the Criterion Collection’s release on one Blu-Ray disc of three films directed by Paul Fejos, a Hungarian-born filmmaker (the name was originally Pál Fejös – or, as it would have been spelled in his native country, Fejös Pál, since Hungarians, like many Asians but no other Europeans, put the family name first and the given name last) who was billed as being a bacteriologist (he briefly studied chemistry in college before turning to art and becoming first a painter and then a filmmaker). At this time – the late 1920’s, the uncertain transition in the movie industry between silent and sound filmmaking – directors with a science background were much in demand (Frank Capra recalled in his autobiography that a number of major studios asked to borrow him from Columbia because he’d studied astrophysics in college) on the theory that directors with a science background would be better able to handle the elaborate gadgetry needed to make sound films.

Fejos made his U.S. mark in 1928 with a film called Lonesome, which was the main feature on the Criterion Collection disc and turned out to be a gem, comparable to F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise in its sympathetic portrayal of a young couple and its highly stylized photography that for once added to the story instead of detracting from it. What it didn’t have is the romantic triangle and the temptation of the hero to murder his partner for the sake of the no-good “other woman.” Written by Edward T. Lowe, Jr. and Tom Reed from a story by Mann Page (whose other credits include the Wallace Reid vehicle Rent Free, In Pursuit of Polly and The Country Doctor), Lonesome takes place on Saturday, July 3 (I miss the perpetual calendars they used to publish in phone books – hell, I miss phone books – that could have told me whether July 3, 1928 actually fell on a Saturday) and deals with two proletarians, factory-press operator Jim (Glenn Tryon) and telephone switchboard operator Mary (Barbara Kent), who both live alone in what would now be called single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels.

Since in 1928 it was common to have what amounted to a 5 ½-day workweek – you worked full-time Monday through Friday and then a half-day in the morning on Saturday – the first scenes we see are both Jim and Mary waking up in their separate rooms and racing to get to work on time. They both go to a heavily crowded subway car and are crushed by their fellow passengers, put in their shifts – it’s clear what Mary does but Jim works in one of those elaborate movie factories where we see a lot of machinery (including the metal press he operates) but never find out just what it is the factory produces – and then have the afternoon off but no particular idea what to do with it. Jim is briefly invited to go out with a friend and his friend’s girl, but when he sees a button on his friend’s lapel reading “Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd,” he begs off. Then both Jim and Mary see, from their separate rooms, a wagon with a jazz band blaring away on it (a Black band, and from what we can tell in the head-shots of the musicians it’s a real Black band and not a bunch of white musicians in blackface) advertising an all-day carnival at the beach (actually Coney Island, unnamed in the script but clearly recognizable on screen). They independently decide to go there and purely by chance they meet on the beach (which ironically enough is as crowded as the subway cars they rode to their jobs), and there’s a dialogue scene in which they get to know each other but each pretends to be much richer than they are.

Lonesome was originally what was known then as a “part-talkie,” with dialogue sequences arbitrarily stuck in the middle of what was mostly a silent film with a synchronized soundtrack of music and effects. A number of films that were originally released as part-talkies have come out on home video only as silents, with newly recorded musical accompaniments, and I remember my disappointment when I saw John Ford’s Four Sons (1928) as a silent with a new score and thereby missed the scene I’d seen earlier in a documentary on Ford in which as a German soldier lies dying in the trenches, he called out “Mütterchen” (“little mother”) – a scene that still packs an emotional wallop and no doubt shook audiences in 1928 who still weren’t used to hearing people speak in the movies. None of the three dialogue sequences in Lonesome pack that kind of punch, but they’re still welcome and well enough done even though one problem with part-talkies in general is the jarring alternation between two quite different cinematic languages – which is probably why, of the five major part-talkies I’ve seen (Al Jolson’s vehicles The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool, Frank Capra’s The Younger Generation, William Wyler’s The Love Trap and this one), I liked The Love Trap the best, if only because it was 45 minutes of silent film followed by 24 minutes of talkie, and therefore you didn’t have the infuriating switching back and forth between the two media.

There are three talking sequences in Lonesome, of which the first takes place on the Coney Island beach in the afternoon and features Jim and Mary presenting themselves as far richer than they are and inventing more and more preposterous lies to do so (I wondered if the writers were inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s 1924 short story “I’m a Fool,” in which to woo a genuinely rich girl a non-rich boy adopts an alternate identity, only she leaves before he can tell her who and what he really is and as her train pulls out she promises to look for him – but the only clue she has is the made-up well-to-do identity and location he’s given himself to her). The second one takes place on the Coney Island midway at night and shows Jim and Mary ’fessing up to each other while the lights of the boardwalk twinkle behind them in what looked like two-strip Technicolor to me – and if this was indeed a two-strip sequence and not an elaborate example of tinting, toning or stencil color, this would make Glenn Tryon and Barbara Kent the first actors filmed doing a dialogue scene in color. The last sound sequence occurs in a police station after Jim has been busted; following a long day doing the various rides they ended up on a roller-coaster only on different cars, and the wheel of Mary’s car caught fire (a spectacular toning effect on an otherwise black-and-white image). Jim tried to rush to her after the amusement park’s security people pulled her off the burning car, shaken but safe, but a police officer blocked his way and arrested him. Eventually he’s able to talk himself out of being busted and is allowed to return to the amusement park to go after his new girlfriend – only the park is still so crowded he can’t find her, and after a few near-misses both Jim and Mary slink home, discouraged and still lonesome.

The movie might well have ended like this, but in 1928 as through most of its history Hollywood insisted on happy endings, and the two are brought back together when Jim plays the phonograph in his apartment and puts on a record of Irving Berlin’s “Always” – a favorite go-to song for romantic filmmakers for decades – on a real label (Brunswick) and by an actual singer (Nick Lucas, who introduced the song “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” a year later in Warner Bros.’ musical Gold Diggers of Broadway – Tiny Tim’s celebrated version, which became a novelty hit four decades later, was an almost exact copy of Lucas’s). Mary overhears Jim play the record and is disgusted by the memories of love and loss that day it stirs up (and director Fejos and his sound crew remember to mix the record so it’s not as loud in her apartment as in his). She bangs on his wall to complain about the noise – and when he answers they realize that they’ve been living next door to each other in the same building all the time. (On her TV special Liza with a “Z” Liza Minnelli did a novelty song with the same plot: a woman trots the globe to find the man of her dreams, only he turns out to be right next door. Well, she was the daughter of the woman who introduced “The Boy Next Door.”)

Though the happy ending seems a bit jarring to what’s otherwise been a beautifully bittersweet film, Lonesome is a marvelous movie, well worth the rediscovery: vividly directed (Fejos’s visual fireworks add to the movie instead of detracting from it, and his skill at picking out his two actors in a crowd draws us simply and eloquently into their plight), sensitively written and well cast. Glenn Tryon isn’t exactly the most romantic or charismatic leading man imaginable for this role, but it’s his sheer ordinariness that makes him believable; and likewise Barbara Kent is good-looking and competent as an actress but not so drop-dead gorgeous as to throw off the film’s delicate balance. I also had a personal nostalgic glow at seeing the attractions – the rotating barrel, the giant slip ’n’ slide rotating wheel, the distorting mirrors that made you look either fatter or slimmer than you were (sometimes both at the same time depending on which part of your body they were reflecting), and the giant slide were all parts of Playland at the Beach, the large old-fashioned amusement park on the beach at San Francisco that lasted long enough going there was a part of my childhood.

Broadway (Universal, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lonesome was a surprise box-office hit, and so director Paul Fejos got rewarded with a series of big assignments at Universal: Broadway, the studio’s biggest production of 1929, based on a hit play by Phillip Dunning and George Abbott (Abbott was literally a grand old man of the theatre; he wrote his first play in 1913 and continued working almost until his death in 1995 at age 107); La Marsellaise, a big-budget spectacular about the French Revolution; and King of Jazz, Universal’s super-musical featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. Alas, Broadway was the only one of these films Fejos actually finished; he had a nervous breakdown while shooting La Marseillaise (the film, retitled Captain of the Guard, was completed by John S. Robertson, whose best-known credit was the 1920 John Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). As for King of Jazz, it was assigned to Ziegfeld Follies director John Murray Anderson, who turned in an epic job – only the film was such an enormous flop (thanks largely to a change in the Zeitgeist that made big-budget musicals box-office poison) Anderson never got to direct an entire film again and Universal was almost driven out of business. (They were bailed out by the blockbuster horror successes Dracula and Frankenstein.)

Alas, Broadway was an example of a director who achieved a brilliant success – artistic and commercial – with a low-budget film telling a simple story being rewarded by being assigned to a big commercial blockbuster property and muffing it. (More recently we’ve seen this happen to Rian Johnson, Gareth Edwards and David Bowie’s filmmaker son, Duncan Jones.) Paul Fejos begins Broadway beautifully with an aerial shot of New York City – it’s pretty obviously a model but Fejos tracks through it spectacularly and achieves the same kind of city montage he’d used so effectively as a scene-setter for Lonesome. Only once the camera comes to rest on the Club Paradise, a New York nightclub run by Nick Verdis (Paul Porcasi), the Dunning-Abbott plot, adapted by Lonesome writers Edward T. Lowe and Tom Reed along with Charles Furthman and Abbott himself, kicks in and we’re seeing a pretty lame gangster movie with brief musical interludes.

The gangster movie centers around who’s going to supply the Club Paradise with bootleg booze (this being four years before the repeal of Prohibition, an experiment stupid in purpose): “Scar” Edwards (Leslie Fenton), who to the extent the gangsters had an informal agreement over who could sell what where was supposed to “own” Harlem; or Steve Crandall (Robert Ellis, who bears an odd resemblance to Paul Whiteman that probably jarred 1929 audiences), who’s started hijacking “Scar”’s shipments (ostensibly of real Scotch smuggled in across the Atlantic, though when we hear that claim in the dialogue we go, “Yeah, right … ”) and is pressuring Nick to buy the stolen product. Only Nick is understandably worried about being caught up in a gang war and doesn’t want to antagonize “Scar” (whose real name, we eventually learn, is Jim) by buying liquor that’s been hijacked from his trucks. There’s also romantic intrigue at the Club Paradise; the star entertainer, Roy Lane (Glenn Tryon), has been rehearsing a duo act with one of the chorus girls, Billie Moore (Merna Kennedy, leading lady of Charlie Chaplin’s underrated 1928 masterpiece, The Circus, who like a lot of other women who’d worked with Chaplin got a major-studio contract until producers found that, bereft of the careful guidance of Chaplin, they couldn’t act for beans), and wants to go out as a vaudeville act and play the Palace Theatre.

Only Billie is also the object of a major pursuit by Steve Crandall, who wows her with his ill-gotten riches and wants to marry her – though, like a typical movie villain of the period, he doesn’t think he ought to stop seeing other women even when he has a wife. There’s also a hard-bitten chorine named Pearl (played by Evelyn Brent, about the only person in this movie who turns in a great performance) who happens to be “Scar” Edwards’ girlfriend, and when Crandall lures “Scar” to the Club Paradise and shoots him in the back, Pearl is understandably upset and vows revenge. Also there’s a taciturn police detective named Dan McCorn (Thomas Jackson – he and Porcasi were the only actors from the 1928 stage production that repeated their roles in the film, and Jaclson went on playing taciturn and implacable cops for at least two decades after the release of Broadway) who’s trying to get the goods on Crandall despite a lack of cooperation from just about everybody at the Club Paradise. Crandall “offs” “Scar” and plants the gun he used on Roy Lane, and it’s touch-and-go for about two or three reels whether he can talk McCorn out of arresting him. Roy and Billie actually saw Crandall and his henchman leading the supposedly drunk – but really dead – “Scar” out of the Club Paradise, and Roy tries to tell this to McCorn, but Billie refuses to back up his story because Crandall has bribed her with a fancy women’s watch to lie for him.

In between the gangster scenes – of which the best that can be said is that they weren’t probably as clichéd to a 1929 audience as they seem now because Dunning and Abbott had invented a lot of these clichés for their play – there are brief musical interludes featuring Roy Lane leading the Club Paradise chorus in bits and pieces of some of the lamest songs of the period: “The Chicken or the Egg,” “Hot-Footin’ It,” “Hittin’ the Ceiling,” “Sing a Little Love Song” and a ditty that was obviously intended to be the title song but only a blip of it gets performed. Until the big final sequence, shot in two-strip Technicolor and which had to be restored from a Vitaphone-system sound disc and a Hungarian print of the alternate silent version because it was lost from the surviving sound print, we don’t get to see a complete musical number anywhere in the film – nor, given the awfulness of the songs by Con Conrad, Archie Gottler and Sidney D. Mitchell, do we particularly want to. (You wouldn’t guess from this movie that five years later Con Conrad and Herb Magidson would win the first Academy Award for Best Song for “The Continental,” from the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic The Gay Divorcée.) By far the best piece of music in this film is an instrumental, which I believe is called “Broadway Rhapsody” or “Manhattan Rhapsody,” which I’m sure I’ve heard elsewhere and is played over a montage sequence showing the club’s cleaning people getting it ready for the next night’s festivities. It’s also repeated over the closing credits, though this Blu-Ray edition truncated it.

Broadway isn’t a bad movie, and certainly we’ve seen even worse early talkies – the line delivery isn’t as naturalistic as we got from early-1930’s films but there at least aren’t the mind-numbing pauses between (and sometimes in the middle of) lines that made the 1929 Charlie Chan movie Behind That Curtain almost unwatchable – but one gets the impression that even in 1929 there was a better potential movie in this story than the one that actually got made. Merna Kennedy’s performance isn’t bad, exactly; she has at least some clue that to act in a sound film you have to vary the inflections of your lines to convey emotions, but all too much of her line delivery is pretty flat and one wishes Evelyn Brent had been promoted to play her role. But then we wouldn’t have Brent’s superb playing of the final scene, in which she confronts Steve Crandall and shoots him, not in the back but to his face because she wants to be the last thing he sees before she consigns him to hell – and in a surprising twist even for this genuinely “pre-Code” film, Detective McCorn lets her get away with it because he finds her crime morally justifiable, and announces that as far as the police are concerned Crandall killed himself. At least one imdb.com reviewer said the film would have been better if Lee Tracy, the actor who played Roy Lane on stage, had repeated the role on film – though I have no idea if Lee Tracy could dance (the one scene that shows Roy Lane doing a solo dance at the club shows him only from the waist down, obviously so they could use a dance double for Glenn Tryon) and he might have made the character even more annoying than Tryon does. The very ordinariness that made Tryon so good in Lonesome – even his gawky moments seem appropriate for the love-struck proletarian character he’s playing – serves him ill here; a character who advertises that he has star-making “personality” is played by a performer who has virtually none. The actor I kept thinking should have got the part was James Cagney, who at the time hadn’t made a film but whose star charisma, spectacular dancing and overall personality would have been ideal for the role – provoking a thought experiment in alternative film history: what if Cagney had made an explosive film debut in a story so perfectly tailored for him and gone on to become a star at Universal instead of becoming a star at Warner Bros., where he chafed at being put in one crime film after another? (In Cagney’s autobiography he said he always considered himself a song-and-dance man at heart, and his one career regret was that he made so few musicals.)

Broadway was stunningly produced – perhaps too stunningly produced for its own good; cinematographer Hal Mohr, who lived long enough to be interviewed by serious film historians (including Leonard Maltin) and is our best primary source on the making of this film, joked that Roy Lane wanted to play the Palace whereas the nightclub he was performing in was big enough to contain the Palace and New York’s other biggest theatres at the time, the Winter Garden and the Hippodrome, all at once. Broadway is also the film for which Fejos and Mohr had an elaborate camera crane constructed that was so big that, as film historian William K. Everson joked, it looked more like a medieval scaling tower than a piece of film equipment. Alas, though they had this marvelous crane at their disposal, they did surprisingly little with it and for some reason it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Fejos or anyone else connected with this film that as long as they had this object that could do stunning overhead shots, they should design the film’s production numbers to be shot from above. Though Busby Berkeley, who’d become the most famous director to use that effect, wouldn’t make his film debut until Samuel Goldwyn’s Eddie Cantor vehicle Whoopee a year later, at least three other directors – Luther Reed in Rio Rita, Joseph Santley in The Cocoanuts (the Marx Brothers’ first film), and Albertina Rasch in her dance sequences for Lord Byron of Broadway and the unfinished revue film The March of Time, had shot down at chorus lines and deployed dancers in the kaleidoscope patterns later identified with Berkeley.

Whereas most musicals in 1929 shot chorus lines as if we were watching from a good orchestra seat in the theatre (and sometimes the cameras were so far away the dancers looked like ants on a wedding cake), all too often the numbers in Broadway look like we were watching them from the rafters. For a movie that was such a spectacular entertainment in its time – Universal advertised it by saying, “At last you can SEE and HEAR the most imitated play ever pictured; with the ORIGINAL play dialog; with songs that you'll never forget; with drama that will hit your heart!,” and in a piece of copyright trollery that seems outrageous even in our age of far-reaching “intellectual property” claims, Universal threatened to sue any other studio that released a film with the word “Broadway” in its title – it hasn’t worn well.

The Cossacks (MGM, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” was The Cossacks, a 1928 MGM production starring John Gilbert as Lukashka, effeminate son of Cossack ataman (head of the band in a particular Cossack village) Ivan (Ernest Torrence), who would rather pick flowers and look for turtles with his sort-of girlfriend Maryana (played by Renée Adorée, one of the great phony names in film history) than do the butch Cossack thing and ride into war against the Turks. From that synopsis I was expecting a Four Feathers-like story in which coward Gilbert would be rejected from his community, would ride into war secretly, become a hero and be welcomed back into the clan – but all that happens in the first half-hour of this 100-minute movie. What occupies the rest of it is a typical silent-film romantic triangle between Lukashka, Maryana and Prince Olenin Stieshneff (Nils Asther), who’s been sent by the Tsar in Moscow (so this is happening before Peter the Great built St. Petersburg and moved the Russian capital there) to marry a Cossack bride in order to strengthen the royal family’s bloodline with some real fighting blood. He’s also there to announce that Russia has concluded a peace treaty with Turkey, which – at least according to this story, written by Frances Marion and ostensibly based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy (if he had anything to do with this, it must have been a quickie he cranked out for the rubles) – would deprive the Cossacks of their whole raison d’étre.

So Ivan gets the idea of writing the Sultan of Turkey an insulting letter that will get him to break off the peace treaty and resume the war with Russia, thereby giving the Cossacks a reason to start fighting again. Ivan has also told his son that he’s only “half a Cossack” because even though he’s racked up 10 Turks he’s killed in battle, he hasn’t yet suffered a wound – which made me joke that John Gilbert would reply, “You mean I have to lose a leg like I did in The Big Parade?” Instead he gets a slash across his forehead leading to the upper part of his nose – a scar that comes and goes for the rest of the movie – and when he returns from one of the Cossacks’ battles he decides to have a hot sexual encounter with one of the gypsy girls who show up to service the Cossacks (so all of a sudden this movie at least briefly turns into Carmen!), only Maryana catches him and decides to dump her warrior slut and marry the Prince. But as they ride off in a box-shaped carriage their party is waylaid by the Turks, one of whom stabs the Prince in the back with a dagger (thereby eliminating the inconvenient second male lead). The battle goes ill for the Cossacks and both Ivan and Lukashka are captured, tortured, branded and threatened with having their eyes put out by those nasty Turks until the other Cossacks rescue them; Ivan expires from the treatment he received at the Turks’ hands but Lukashka survives, assumes leadership of the Cossack band, and with the competition conveniently eliminated he and Maryana get together at the end.

Whatever its merits as a novel might have been, as a movie. The Cossacks is a triumph of style over lack of substance. The script by Frances Marion – who apparently protested the assignment on the ground that Tolstoy’s novel wasn’t really that good as the basis for a film – basically is a dumping ground for macho-movie clichés, though the most obnoxious sexism in the film comes more from John Colton’s titles than Marion’s work. (According to James Whale biography James Curtis, Marion’s strength as a writer was story and scenario construction, which made her a star writer in the silent era; her weakness was dialogue, which left her somewhat at sea in the sound era – especially when Irving Thalberg died and Marion left MGM rather than work with the new management. Curtis blames her for the silliness of Whale’s next-to-last feature, Green Hell, pointing to one ridiculous line in which one of the characters, reassuring another about the injury to a third, says, “It’s only a coma.” A lot of people protested that line at the time, especially after preview audiences laughed at it, but it stayed in the movie.) All those lines about Cossack women working themselves to the bone, losing their beauty and getting old get really tiresome after a while!

The Cossacks was directed by George W. Hill, who’d done the big battle scenes for The Big Parade (though King Vidor received sole directorial credit) and brought the same level of skill to the big battle scenes here; his work is genuinely creative and exciting. At times The Cossacks looks like a war movie from 15 to 20 years later despite the relative primitiveness of the weaponry; Hill, who’d actually seen combat in World War I, clearly knew what a battle should look like on screen. MGM really shot the works budget-wise on The Cossacks, building an entire Cossack village in Laurel Canyon and trooping out the company to shoot the final two reels in the spectacular canyons of Arizona – which makes it suddenly look like a John Ford Western; Charles joked it was a bad geographical decision to travel from Cossack country to Moscow via Arizona. It was the most expensive silent film MGM produced – though there’s no clue in Jacqueline Stewart’s commentary about how well it did at the box office or what sort of soundtrack it might have had originally. By late 1928 all films were expected to have some sort of recorded soundtrack, even if it were only music and sound effects, and there are a lot of reports in the trade press of the time about movies that had suddenly been withdrawn from planned releases to have at least one or two talking sequences hurriedly inserted.

I’m presuming The Cossacks went out originally with at least some sort of music-and-effects accompaniment, but the version we were watching (from a remarkably well-preserved print) had a musical score dubbed in by Robert Israel, who made the mistake of inserting a lot of vocal choruses as the film showed the Cossacks riding to or from their battles or praying, which they did quite a lot of because according to Cossack lore, “above all is God.” The music sounded vaguely familiar – Charles thought one theme sounded like Jerome Kern’s song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and I recognized Tchaikovsky’s “Miniature Overture” from The Nutcracker as the theme for Prince Stieshneff, who I got the impression was played by Nils Asther because MGM needed someone even less butch than John Gilbert. Gilbert had a few more silents ahead of him after The Cossacks and before his ignominious talkie debut in something called His Glorious Night, and it’s almost painful to watch the sheer amount of drinking he does in this film with the foreknowledge that within eight years he would basically drink himself to death. Alexander Walker wrote that unlike Rudolph Valentino, who seemed to have something he was keeping in reserve, “Gilbert gave all of himself” – which ironically makes Valentino seem the more modern performer – and judging from the sound films of Gilbert’s I’ve seen his problem in the sound era wasn’t his voice per se but that he never learned to act with his voice, how to vary his inflections to express emotions. Gilbert’s overall career is a sad one despite his huge success – mostly from the back-to-back masterpieces he shot in 1925 with great directors, King Vidor in The Big Parade and Erich von Stroheim in The Merry Widow – he seems off-screen to have been the same kind of devil-may-care character he played on-screen, and as dated as his acting looks there seems to have been a glimmer of potential he could have developed if he’d been more responsible about his career.

Belle Le Grand (Republic, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Cossacks Charles and I watched a grey-label DVD from a TV airing on a channel called “Encore Western” of a 1951 film called Belle Le Grand, directed by silent-film veteran Allan Dwan, whose film career had begun in 1911 and would continue until 1958. At one point in the 1920’s Dwan had been an “A”-list director helming films for the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (he did the 1922 Robin Hood, with Fairbanks not only as star but, under the name “Elton Thomas,” as writer, and in some ways it caught the spirit of nobility and chivalry better than any subsequent version, including the great 1938 remake with Errol Flynn, and he also did the 1929 film The Iron Mask) and Gloria Swanson (five silent films plus one talkie, 1930’s What a Widow!). Then he went to Britain for three years and when he returned he found himself mostly forgotten by the major studios – though he did two films with Shirley Temple (Heidi, 1937; and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 1938 – both of which, as Dwan freely admitted, bore little resemblance to the children’s novels that were their ostensible story sources) at the height of her popularity.

In 1946 he ended up under contract to Republic, founded by the ferociously Right-wing Herbert Yates, who had formed a relationship with a Czech skater named Vera Hruba, whom he signed to a long-term movie contract and became her sponsor as well. Yates added “Ralston” to her last name and tried to build her into leading roles, but as Ray Hamel noted in his biographical note on imdb.com, “Hruba's English was so limited she was forced to learn her lines phonetically. Her English improved, and directors said she tried hard to learn her craft, but bad acting and a thick accent made it difficult for audiences to accept her.” At least when William Randolph Hearst tried to foist Marion Davies on the cinematic world he was dealing with a genuinely talented light comedienne – though as hard as Hearst worked to advance Davies’ career, he also sabotaged it by putting her in period dramas and other films that drowned her talents in production values. Yates was dealing with a far less talented inamorata than Hearst was, and during Belle Le Grand I joked that at the top of the talent list of foreign-born actresses who retained their accents in their U.S. films were Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, and at the bottom there was Vera Hruba Ralston.

In a 1960’s extended interview with Peter Bogdanovich that became the book Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer, Dawn lamented having to work with Ralston and her Belle Le Grand co-star John Carroll – who in the 1930’s had made some independent films, got an MGM contract and been groomed as one of the many young actors they were trying out as potential replacements for Clark Gable after the real Gable walked out on his contract for the duration of World War II and flew in combat. The real Gable returned before the war ended, making the 1944 film Adventure, and all of a sudden the faux Gables became superfluous. Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1946 Carroll ran out his MGM contract and signed with the much less prestigious Republic studio, and when asked why he gave a marvelously practical answer I cherish: “Republic’s money buys groceries just like MGM’s does, and they’re giving me quite a bit more of it.” Carroll continued his career at Republic for several years, essentially stepping into roles that might have gone to Republic’s biggest star, John Wayne, if the Duke hadn’t got tired of working with Ralston.

Of their immediately previous picture, Surrender, Dwan groused, “Oh, boy. That’s another one with two great actors in it – John Carroll and Vera Hruba Ralston. I can’t tell you what I think about it – it should be buried some place.” Dwan was kinder to the memory of Belle Le Grand, mainly because its main action took place in the Nevada silver country in the 1870’s. “I’ve been crazy about Virginia City anyway – its history – and it was a pleasure to work in that background. I like the romance of it – quiet, strange, weird history. They were looking for silver, and throwing all this grey mud away until they found out it was silver.” Belle Le Grand, written by D. D. Beauchamp based on a story by incredibly prolific Western writer Peter B. Kyne, actually starts in the 1850’s South, where Charles LaFarge (Stephen Crane) and Sally Sinclair (Vera Ralston – she was billed without the “Hruba” this time) are running gambling operations on the Mississippi riverboats. When one of their customers drops a lot of money and accuses them of running rigged games, LaFarge stabs him in the back, throws him in the river, and then flees, leaving Sally as the fall girl. In a series of scenes showing the whirlwind exposition Dwan was proud of, within just a few minutes of screen time her attorney makes a passionate plea to acquit her, she’s convicted (we don’t see the jury return the verdict, just the judge passing sentence afterwards), she does five years in prison and just before she’s taken into custody her dad disowns her – all in about five minutes of screen time.

When she gets out after a five-year sentence, all she has for family is her ever-faithful Black maid Daisy (Marietta Canty, third in line for the “Mammy” roles if they couldn’t get Hattle McDaniel or Louise Beavers). Belle finds out that her dad died in the first year of her sentence and her younger sister Nan was taken away to be raised in an orphanage and given the new last name “Henshaw.” Then another one of Dwan’s whirlwind montages shows Sally reviving her riverboat games under the name “Belle Le Grand” and becoming sensationally rich. (One date in the montage is 1864, which had Charles wondering just how many riverboat casinos were plying the Mississippi tlat late in the Civil War.) Eventually she settles in San Francisco in 1870 and opens a big and highly profitable casino on the Barbary Coast. One day her travels take her to the San Francisco Stock Exchange, where she notices that her ex-husband, now using the name “Montgomery Crame,” is trying to make a fortune by short-selling shares in a supposedly played out silver mine in Nevada called the Carousel – only the Carousel’s principal stockholder, John Kilton (John Carroll), has actually discovered a new lode on the Carousel’s property but successfully withholds that information until he dramatically arrives on the floor of the stock exchange to announce it, send the Carousel’s share price up stratospherically, and all but ruin Crame. (It was fun to watch a movie in which an unscrupulous short-seller gets creamed by an active effort to trade up the price of the stock just after the Gamestop affair when that happened in real life.)

Then Crame realizes that key to controlling the flow of silver from the Carousel is owning the Queen Midas mine just north of it – only he finds that Kilton has beaten him to that, too. Meanwhile, Belle, who’s never given up looking for her sister, Nan Henshaw (Muriel Lawrence), finds her about to give a concert as a singer in San Francisco. Her vocal training has been subsidized by a mysterious benefactress named “Mary Kittredge,” but do I really need to tell you who “Mary Kittredge” actually is? In one of the fits of bravado he’s prone to, John Kilton offers Nan Henshaw $10,000 for just one concert in Virginia City, center of the Nevada mining community – but Crame strikes again, acquiring an $800,000 debt Kilton owed someone else and threatening to foreclose on the Queen Midas if it isn’t paid in 30 days. To make sure Kilton and his miners can’t produce enough silver in that time to meet the payment, Crame hires a drifter named Abel Stone (Henry Morgan – Charles was really startled to see him; I was less surprised because I’d noticed his name in the credits, but still it’s a shock to see the avuncular Col. Potter from the later stages of the M*A*S*H TV show not only so young but so villainous) to set fire to the mine.

The plan works too well for Abel Stone’s conscience, since the fire leaves 13 miners trapped inside; in a number of scenes that must have taxed John Carroll’s stunt double, Kilton heroically rescued eight of them but the other five died. Crame uses the fire to turn the miners against Kilton and get them to lynch him and his principal associates, but at the end Belle Le Grand – who in her “Mary Kittredge” persona has already paid off the $800,000 Kilton owed Crame – saves the day by persuading the miners that it was actually Stone, not Kilton, who set the fire. (I thought it would have been stronger writing if Stone had himself made the confession out of guilt, but instead he tries to run away and one of the miners shoots him.) There are also a couple of other characters, Emma McGee (a marvelous performance by Hope Emerson in a Molly Brown-type role) and her husband Corky (John Qualen), who have hit it big in Kilton’s silver mines and built a preposterous house in which neither of them feels particularly comfortable – until they lose their money in Kilton’s mines due to Crame’s machinations and are forced to go back to running the boarding house for miners they started out in, while Belle Le Grand agrees to buy their big house so she can turn it into her latest casino.

Meanwhile John Kilton is romancing Nan Henshaw in hopes of getting her to give up her singing career and settle down with him as a housewife – shades of Maytime and The Red Shoes! – only Belle in her “Mary Kittredge” role short-circuits that in a hurry by paying an impresario named Gambarelli (Gino Corrado) to book her on a nationwide tour that will end in New York City and drive out of her head once and for all any notion of her giving up her career to get married – especially to the man Belle herself is in love with, and whom she lands in the last reel. Belle Le Grand isn’t a great movie – and as Charles noted it’s not particularly a “Western” even though it’s set (mostly) in Nevada in 1870 – but like The Cossacks it’s a triumph of style over (lack of) substance. Allan Dwan’s years of practice in the director’s craft show in his easy command of a moving camera and his expert pacing of the film, while he gets out of Ralston and Carroll the best performances of which they were capable. Dawn admitted of Ralston, “She tried very hard and was a very nice girl. She just hadn’t been trained to be an actress long enough to star in pictures.” I spent much of Belle Le Grand noticing its plot similarities to Rex Beach’s novel The Spoilers, also about skulduggery in a mining community (though in The Spoilers it’s gold in Alaska instead of silver in Nevada) and wishing the stars of the best-known version of the oft-filmed The Spoilers, Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne, had got to be in this one instead of Vera Ralston and John Carroll. But even as it stands Belle Le Grand is a pleasant film and one you can spend 90 minutes watching without the feeling that you’ve wasted your time.

The Long Island Serial Killer: A Mother's Hunt for Justice (Lighthouse Pictures, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched an uncommonly good Lifetime movie with the awkward title The Long Island Serial Killer: A Mother’s Hunt for Justice, vividly directed by Stanley M. Brooks with John Pielmeier as the sole writer. It was one of Lifetime’s “Ripped from the Headlines!” stories, and as in previous Lifetime films made under that rubric, the basis in a true story (even with a closing credit that admitted some characters and events had been fictionalized) helped discipline the writers and steered them away from the usual phony complications of Lifetime movies and in the direction of emotional as well as literal truth. The central character is a single mother in New York City named Mari Gilbert (Kim Delaney, who was also on the writing committee and who turns in a searing performance rivaling Frances McDormand’s Academy Award-winning turn in a very similar role in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). She has two daughters, 24-year-old Shannan (Katharine Isabelle), who’s sharing an apartment with her boyfriend – a vaguely Asian-looking guy who shaves his head and isn’t listed on the film’s imdb.com page – and who turns tricks for a living because she can make a hell of a lot more money doing that than working at Walmart, seemingly her only other career choice; and teenager Sarra (Jessica McLeod). Both are diagnosed with mental illnesses, Shannen as bipolar and Sarra as schizophrenic.

One night Shannan, who’d been staying with her mom for a weekend, announces that she has a “date” that night and is picked up by her boyfriend, who’s taking the basic hooker’s protection by driving her to the gig and waiting for her outside in case there’s any trouble and she needs to be rescued and driven home in a hurry. Shannan doesn’t leave an exact address but scrawls an approximate location on a note pad in her mom’s place, which gives her a lead when she disappears and mom investigates. At first mom tries to get results through the Long Island police department, but the police can’t be bothered: the chief detective assigned to the case, Dominick Varrone (John Cassini), says the usual line about it takes time and patience for a case like this to be solved, though he does give Mari a helpful suggestion: he asks for a piece of clothing Shannen had recently worn and hadn’t been washed since so they can use it to have police dogs track a scent. The dogs don’t find Shannen but do find at least four other sets of remains of young women buried on the Long Island beach, and to the extent they can identify them they turn out to be “sex workers” (the au courant euphemism for prostitutes used throughout the script) who disappeared mysteriously.

In a grimly ironic twist in the tale, all but one of the bodies eventually found turn out to be genetically female – obviously the one that wasn’t belonged to a Transwoman who was working as a prostitute – and slowly as the police identify the remains (thanks to a sympathetic medical examiner who seems to be more interested in solving the case than the actual cops) Mari gets in touch with relatives or friends of the other victims, including a young Black woman (an appealing performance by Princess Davis) who was the roommate of Amber, another victim, and (it’s hinted) a “sex worker” herself. Mari traces Shannan’s boyfriend and also the “john” she was supposed to have sex for money with that night, and both recall that she fled the scene because she was in danger from somebody else and she spent 15 to 20 minutes on the phone to 911 in hopes of getting the police to respond before she was killed by the mystery person … only the cops didn’t come (later Mari is given the excuse that Shannen’s cell-phone signal was being “pinged” across so many towers the cops couldn’t locate it even though the call ran over 15 minutes. Of course, through much of this movie we’re beginning to wonder, “Aren’t 911 calls recorded?: Where’s the tape?”

Mari and the private investigator she hires, an African-American former police officer named Herc Zinnemann (Eugene Clark) who having been in the local police department knows what he’s up against, ultimately obtain the 911 call tape and Mari listens to it and thereby hears first-hand the last minutes of her daughter’s life. (In one of his few miscalculations, director Brooks overdubs a particularly loud and pretentious bit of music – a big orchestra with wordless choir – over the 911 tape so Mari gets to hear it but we don’t.) Meanwhile the Long Island Police Department gets a new chief, who’s been a detective on the force before and within two days of the discovery of Shannen’s body (there’s a marvelous scene in which Herc comes over to Mari’s place to notify her that Shannan has been found dead, Mari collapses in Herc’s arms, and just then Mari’s daughter Sarra comes down the stairs in the house, sees Herc holding Mari and her look of contempt immediately reveals that she thinks her mom and Herc have become lovers, and resents it) Varrone is fired from the department.

There’s a seemingly irrelevant scene whose importance becomes clear later: a young woman named Amy, who was a friend of one of the victims found at the beach, shows up at a party on her first night as a “sex worker,” is cruised by the new police chief and later narrates the story of what happened after that: he took her into a bathroom and tried to have her then and there, only he didn’t climax and he got mad at her and nearly strangled her while having sex with her, but still didn’t ejaculate. The chief becomes one of the suspects, and another suspect is a doctor who formerly worked with the police department who was on the scene with Shannan’s boyfriend and her john the night she disappeared – and who presumably could have given her drugs to make her helpless so he could kill her. In the end the doctor is arrested for two of the murders but we’re left with the impression that there were multiple killers all using the same part of the Long Island beach as a site to dump bodies; also some of the bodies were cut up (which certainly suggests someone with medical training) with different parts dumped in different locations. The FBI steps in and arrests the police chief and also the district attorney for corruption, and a title at the end mentions that the real Mari Gilbert also died by violence – her schizo daughter Sarra shot her in 2016 during a psychotic episode.

The Long Island Serial Killer: A Mother’s Hunt for Justice is that ultra-rare Lifetime movie that’s good enough to have been a theatrical feature: instead of silly plot devices and either overacting or underacting, we get a grim slice of life, with fully professional writing and direction and a quite powerful cast whose members seem to be inhabiting their roles rather than acting them. The writer or writers also deserve kudos for not making Mari Gilbert a secular saint; she has her weaknesses – notably incipient alcoholism that gets not so incipient as she downs bottle after bottle of wine to assuage her anguish at not only the disappearance and death of her daughter but her inability to get the police to move on the case and her growing suspicions that they don’t consider the deaths of a bunch of sex workers to be a high priority. I remember when cops frequently dismissed the murders of prostitutes with the acronym “NHI,” which stood for “No Humans Involved,” and it’s not that big a stretch from the police sloughing off the murders of hookers to the police getting freebies from the hookers and at the same time actively protecting their killers. It’s an excellent movie and the sort of diamond in the rough those of us who slog through innumerable Lifetime movies hoping for the occasional good ones are waiting for and gratified to discover – and I’d certainly be interested in watching any other film featuring any of these talents, either behind or in front of the camera!